Sabrina Biechele from Putzbrunn and Harald Schertele from Aying did particularly well in the Home Ministry’s dialect quiz. Both of them benefited from the fact that they traveled around Bavaria a lot.
There are certainly many exchange students from distant countries who end up studying in Bavaria, for example at the University of Regensburg, and who struggle for words as soon as they arrive. They studied German in their homeland to prepare, but what the people here speak has nothing to do with it. The fallen dyphthong “ou”, which reminds others of a bark, as well as other linguistic peculiarities of the Upper Palatinate people make it difficult for them to believe that it is a variant of the German language when someone says: “But ma talk ja niad, ma says nou blous.”