If anyone is still interested, I recommend the following items on German dialects (especially if you're already comfortable with using standard German).
1)
Useful Notes / German Dialects - this is an interesting summary on German dialects and describes some of the characteristics of the main groups but also where they can be encountered in German movies and TV (in as much as it's possible - see my note earlier that an actor/character using full dialect without subtitles is rare because it would make things incomprehensible to a goodly amount of the audience).
2)
Grüezi, Moin, Servus!: Wie wir wo sprechen - this is a fun paperback that doesn't require a background in linguistics to take in. It covers about a 100 common concepts/objects and describes the ways that they're "translated" in the Germanosphere. Each "translation" comes with an isogloss map showing where a certain form is used or is typical. For example it has a picture of a cook flipping a pan with a pancake and describes it as "thin layer of batter made of flour, eggs, milk and salt that's fried on a pan" (either
Pfannkuchen or
Eierkuchen "crêpe, pancake" are acceptable as standard in Germany). It then shows how it's translated in the German-speaking world complete with an isogloss map showing among other "translations" that it's known as
Palatschinke in eastern Austria including Vienna while in much of the former East Germany including Berlin it's called
Eierkuchen since
Pfannkuchen there refer to a certain kind of jelly donut known as
Berliner or
Krapfen to most other Germans, not a pancake. I didn't buy this book, but did browse through a good part of it while killing time at an outlet of
Thalia.
3)
dtv-Atlas: Deutsche Sprache - this is a little like a more technical and beefed-up version of "Grüezi, Moin, Servus!: Wie wir wo sprechen" above, and goes into a level of detail that's useful to a linguist or anyone interested in the evolution of German from antiquity when there was just a Proto-Germanic daughter of Proto-Indo-European. The second half of the book deals with dialectal characteristics complete with isogloss maps not just of certain lexical items, but also of several phonological and morphological features of German dialects (e.g. it has a map showing the dialectal correspondances of intervocalic
-d- of standard German as found in
Bruder "brother"). I got a second-hand copy of this a few days ago, and am already enjoying it while reading it on my daily commute, despite its technical writing style sometimes taxing my abilities in German (it helps though that I'm familiar with some aspects of the history of German).
Both books are fairly cheap (about €10), and it's possible to find a "dtv-Atlas: Deutsche Sprache" used on Amazon Marketplace for just a few dollars, pounds or Euros.
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If an outsider were serious about learning something about a German dialect independently, there is some serious reference material available (e.g.
Wörterbuch deutscher Dialekte: Eine Sammlung von Mundartwörtern aus 10 Dialektgebieten,
Plattdeutsche Grammatik: Formen und Funktionen,
Das Radio Tirol-Wörterbuch der Tiroler Mundarten) and even a few respectable-looking textbooks (e.g.
Schweizerdeutsch in 30 Tagen,
Platt - dat Lehrbook: Ein Sprachkurs für Erwachsene) in addition to somewhat light-hearted phrasebooks (e.g.
Langenscheidt Schwäbisch für Anfänger - Der humorvolle Sprachführer für Schwäbisch-Fans,
Langenscheidt Lilliput Berlinerisch). If you run a search on Amazon.de or similar using one of the names of the dialects (e.g. "Hessisch", "Sächsisch", "Badisch", "Platt", "Tirolerisch"), you'll find a few goodies, although most seem to be books rather than audio, and so you might need to look on YouTube for audio.
Dialektatlas on Deutsche Welle also describes the dialects of Germany with a few audio samples if you're just curious about dialects.
