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Comment by _Codemonkeyism | Hacker News Reader

Additionally in different parts of Germany the gender of many nouns is different.

I am a native speaker but can't think of any, care to give an example?

I learned German in Austria and I was taught a handful of words which we use a different article here as compared to in Germany. My recollection is that most of these words either were commercial, like Nutella, or loan words coming from other languages (e.g. not every loan word is neutral).

But while I did eventually get my C1, my German isn't great so I don't want to claim any expertise.

Nutella is a pathological example. It's a running gag among German speakers that they cannot figure out its gender. The discussion usually ends when someone suggests something like "das Nutellaglas" ("the jar of Nutella"), i.e. building a compound word so that the other part of the word imposes its gender.

EDIT: This may be interesting for you though. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:German_nouns_which_h...

Die Nutella.

Why do you want the poor Nutella to die? :(

It contains less chocolate now.

An example that comes to mind is butter. It's feminine (die Butter), but in some dialects, it's masculine (der Butter). There are maps for several other words at http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-5/f15a-f/, but I'd take them with a grain of salt. The region I grew up in doesn't really match what these maps say about it.

Oh, I know certain people in Bavaria calling "das Butter", suspicious people no doubt! Everybody knows it is "die Butter" with an option to settle for "der Butter"!

Here you can find examples:

https://infothek.rotkel.de/rechtschreibung/genus.html

A well-known example is "die/das Tram" (rather a Helvetism; this words means the same as in English; the more usual German word is "die Straßenbahn). In Standard German, "Tram" is considered as an abbreviation of "die Trambahn" - so it is female. In South Germany and Switzerland, "das Tram" is used.

- der/das Teller

- der/die Butter

- das/die Huhn

see e.g., https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zwiebelfisch/zwiebelfisch-der-... (German) for more local linguistic peculiarities.

Sorry don't have any at hand, but I'm from Bavaria and my wife is from Brandenburg so our German gender usage sometimes differs.

With regards to dialects, that is reckless risk taking! :-)

Der Joghurt / Das Joghurt / Die Joghurt.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Joghurt

More examples here

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:German_nouns_which_h...

Interesting fact, can you give an example or two?

Nutella is always the word that springs to my mind first... but I couldn't tell you which article is used where.

Actually you can't really say this: https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/8527/wer-sagt-die... See the map in this thread.

It's basically different in any county and different counties can be right next to each other.

Nutella is a proper noun and also a loanword, I was expecting native common noun pairs. (Btw the issue exists in French too for this word, and a few others like Wifi or Gameboy)

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