What an ineresting conversation going on here. I'm Swiss and I can add some things from my perspective. I made a lot of nice German friends abroad ant it was only then that I realised, we use a lot of completely different words and stress differently. For example if I mentioned my WG (=Wohngemeinschaft = shared appartment), the German usually didn't know what I was talking about until we found out that they have the same expression, but stress it differently like "WG".

So sometimes there are just very small differences. And then there are bigger ones like:

<em>cheese -->"Käse"  is "Chäs" in Swiss German</em>

And then you will also hear totally different expressions for the same thing, for example:

<em>tissue --> "Taschentuch" is "Nastüechli" in Swiss German</em>

It gets even more complicated with the different Swiss dialects. The main dialects are "St. Galler"-dialect (wich sounds very bright), "Zürcher"-dialect (with a strong "ch"),, "Basler"-dialect, "Berner"-dialect (very slow) and the "Walliser"-dialect (very different to every other Swiss dialect) and many more.

We mainly pronounce words differently in these dialects, but we also use different expressions:

<em>the part on each end of a loaf of bread --> is called "Ahäueli", "Mürgu", "Aschnitt", "Zipfeli"</em>

What I found quite funny is the fact, that many German (depending on their dialect) don't understand our Swiss German - but at the same time, we Swiss people understand everything in High German, mostly because we have to speak High German at school from the first grade. For us it's not a it's very natural to change into High German - but we keep having a very strong Swiss accent, which is made fun of a lot - and deservedly so ;)

Since there hasn't been a lot about Austrian dialects so far (at least from what I've seen by briefly skimming through the other comments) I thought I could shed some light on the Austrian dialects. Though I don't know a lot myself and am basing my knowledge on the fact that I'm Austrian and my own experiences, so feel free to correct me ^^

Someone said the Bavarian dialect and Austrian dialects are quite similar, that's not entirely wrong but for me I feel that it only applies to the northern Salzburgian dialects, so basically the ones at the German border. Apart from a few words and a slight accent my bavarian friends and I can understand each other without any problems and have a similar dialect. However the farther you get away from the German border (especially getting near the Alps) the dialect changes and for example my moms dialect (she's from a small village in the mountains), when talking with her relatives, is sometimes already hard to understand for me. It's the same with Tirolerisch and the other dialects which developed more secluded (like in valleys). Dialects from upper and lower Austria aren't too different from the Salzburgian dialect, some words are different and the accent too but in general they are quite easy to understand (for me at least).

So I guess the more secluded the area was while the language developed the more 'extrem' their dialect is. But every Austrian village or city has it's own variation of a dialect again ^^' sometimes it's more extrem and sometimes you don't notice anything. Maybe there are some language examples on youtube so if you're interested try searching for: Vorarlbergerisch, Tirolerisch, Kärntnerisch, Wienerisch, Sazburgerisch, Oberösterreichisch, Niederöstereichisch, Burgenländisch

Als ich in brasilien war, konnte ich deutsch sprechen...

German dialects together make up the second most spoken <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Brazil" title="Languages of Brazil">first language in Brazil</a> after Portuguese. A few Brazilian municipalities have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riograndenser_Hunsr%C3%BCckisch" class="mw-redirect" title="Riograndenser Hunsrückisch">Brazilian Hunsrückisch</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Low_German" title="East Low German">Germanic Pomeranian</a> as co-official with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_language" title="Portuguese language">Portuguese</a>. They are located in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Brazil" class="mw-redirect" title="Southern Brazil">Southern Brazil</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esp%C3%ADrito_Santo" title="Espírito Santo">Espírito Santo</a>. In the year 2000 Brazilian census 12 million people in Brazil claimed to be of German descent.<sup id="cite_ref-6" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Brazilians#cite_note-6">[6]</a></sup><sup id="cite_ref-7" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Brazilians#cite_note-7">[7]</a></sup>

<sup id="cite_ref-7" class="reference">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Brazilians
</sup>