Ask a Munich baker for ein Brötchen and you'll get a small pause. You'll get the roll. But nobody in the queue said Brötchen, and after a while you notice nobody ever does.
Standard German is real and it's what you should learn. But Bavaria has a second layer sitting on top of it, and it isn't slang. It's the ordinary vocabulary of ordinary transactions.
Semmel, not Brötchen
Brötchen is the standard word and it's understood everywhere. Semmel is the southern and Austrian one, and in Munich it's simply what the object is called.1
Servus works coming and going
Servus is both hello and goodbye, it's informal, and it comes from Latin, originally a shortening of a phrase meaning "your servant".23
Grüß Gott is the other one: more formal, and constant in shops and with strangers. Neither shows up in most A1 textbooks, which teach Guten Tag. That's correct, understood, and slightly stiff here.
Brotzeit isn't lunch
Literally "bread time", and not any English meal. It's a cold snack of bread, cold cuts, cheese and radishes, eaten at more or less any hour. Standard enough for Duden, still distinctly southern in practice.45
Weißwurst has a deadline
The pale Bavarian veal sausage, and one of the few foods with a time limit attached by folklore: traditionally it shouldn't hear the midday bell.6
Schmarren is dessert and also nonsense
Kaiserschmarrn is the shredded pancake. On its own, Schmarren also means rubbish, so the same word turns up on a dessert menu and in an argument.7
Why these are hard
None of these words are difficult. What makes them hard is where you meet them: at speed, at a counter, while trying to pay for something, with no moment to write anything down.
That's the gap between classroom vocabulary and the vocabulary of a place. One arrives in a list. The other arrives while you're busy.
