Why does this happen? You don't have all-german tv channels, movies, music and whatever for everybody to parrot the "standard" dialect from?
I mean, why would people be blissfully unaware of the standard form.
I mean, why would people be blissfully unaware of the standard form.
Oh, and at least for Swiss German: It is kinda a different language (but extremely related to the written German): It's not just an accent with some funny words, but has a slightly different grammar, too. Most glarious is the lack of most of the verb tenses in Swiss German. So pupils have to learn quite some stuff to be really fluent in written German.
And even just within Switzerland there are dialects I don't understand (as in no clue what they're talking about). People speaking these usually switch to a more conformistic pronounciation when talking to people from other areas and don't use some of the more obscure words.
And for the reasons this all exists (at least for Switzerland): It's cultivated and all kinda part of your local/national identity. Politicians who speak a "too good" written German are deemed suspicious, almost all of the local culture (theater, local movies, even most of the Swiss tv produciton ...) is in Swiss German.
[Native Swiss German speaker, here.]
Switzerland is a very specific case, I guess. The level of national pride is very high, with a very prominent political party living close to the racism edge (and crossing it every now and then), protecting the country from outside influences (contractors from i.e. Germany are not really welcome there, often seen as stealing jobs).
Add to this national pride a good amount of _local_ awareness: CH is a federal system, each 'state'(Kanton) fighting for as much independence as possible. Heck, they don't even have a real capital city [1] because they don't want one state to surpass the others. Your local region of origin seems to be much more important there.
In addition CH has 4 (erm.. 3.5?) official languages and already some 'borders' that separate parts of the country into ~mostly french/german/italian regions. You drive 5 min and every sign switches from German to French and the whole culture changes (food, lifestyle are the easiest things to spot).