Do you speak Berlinerisch?

In his memoirs, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, born in Austria and having spent a few years in Weimar Berlin, evokes the Berlin dialect as it was spoken in the 1930s.

Unlike the dialect of Vienna, spoken in one way or another by everyone from emperor to dustman, the Berlin dialect, a speeded-up, wisecracking urban adaptation of the plattdeutsch language of the north German plain, was primarily a demotic idiom separating the people from the toffs, though well under-stood by all. The mere insistence on specific Berliner grammatical forms which, correct in dialect, were patently incorrect in school German, was enough to keep it separate from educated talk. 

Naturally the middle-class pupils of my classical Gymnasium took to it with enthusiasm, as the pupils of prestigious Paris lycees take to the plebeian argot of their city, and after the end of the GDR, inhabitants of the former East Berlin, resentful but proud, liked to distinguish themselves from the Western rulers of their part of Germany by insisting on 'berlinering', i.e. talking the broadest dialect. It was a confident, brash, in-your-face idiom, into which l also plunged with enthusiasm, even though to this day the native inflection of my German hints at Vienna. Even today the sound, now rare on the street, of pure Berlinerisch, brings back to me the historic moment that decided the shape both of the twentieth century and of my life.

Interesting Times, A Twentieth-Century Life, Eric Hobsbawm, 2002