30 yrs ago, I rode my bike from East Berlin to Amsterdam, hopping from tiny village to tiny village. I kept out of cities so I could sleep in the forest at night and it seemed as if the the local dialect drifted town by town from deutsch to dutch
That’s a good example! I remember being on a train where a woman was reading a book in Dutch to her kids and my then 5 year old son (a German speaker) walked over to sit behind her and listen.