As someone from central Germany, who moved around in Southern Germany quite a bit I have to correct you: When you ignore English, French etc., most Germans are

As someone from central Germany, who moved around in Southern Germany quite a bit I have to correct you: When you ignore English, French etc., most Germans are not bilingual, they are hardly monolingual. Most people who do speak somewhat High German are unable to understand a heavy dialect. Somebody who speaks dialect is almost never able to speak acceptable let alone perfect High German. Even people who manage to suppress the accent are easily recognized, because they often build incorrect grammatical constructs (use of different pronouns, use of dative instead of genitive and so on).