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Comment by Quequau | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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"!

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.

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