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The "official" German, as presented in the media in German,
is called "Hochdeutsch" ("High-German").
Many native speakers of German do not speak this dialect among themselves,
with people of the same region.
These people speak their native local variety of German, which usually sounds
quite different from the "official" German.
This is epsecially true in the rural areas.
People in the big cities tend to speak Hochdeutsch (with a local "accent").
More interestingly, "Hochdeutsch" is not the local dialect of anywhere.
It evolved in the 15th and 16th centuries as a common convention among merchants
from different regions.
Later, Martin Luther used this convention when he translated the Bible into German,
augmenting it whenever necessary
with his own mitigated Saxon dialect.
In the 1870s, Hochdeutsch was declared as the official language of the united Germany,
and it remains so to this day.
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