What? How is that the conclusion you’re drawing here? As a side note, I have learnt and can speak German and have lived and studied in Germany. But more importantly, I feel like we’re having two entirely different conversations. My understanding of your argument is that it is invalid to put down potentially confusing pronunciation differences down to accents. Please correct me if I have misunderstood what you’re saying. My argument is that this is just a natural linguistic process and differing pronunciations even to the point of confusion between dialects is inevitable. If someone’s dialect/accent truly does cause communication problems, then a workaround needs to found, whether that’s rewording things so that confusion caused by pronunciation is averted, or by code-switching to a common dialect in more extreme cases. Neither of these invalidates either dialect or accent. People speak differently, and no matter how strange it might sound, it’s just something you have to get over.