Originally Posted by
stut
As adampenrith said, it could be any number of languages. There's a lot of movement of people in Europe these days...
However, are you sure it wasn't Swiss German? Some of the dialects can be seriously far from Hochdeutsch...
I've ridden on trains in that area a lot (but NOT on locals), the major language spoken is FRENCH.
Though one of the students, trying to panhandle money asked if I spoke Deutsch, when I said ENGLISH, he moved to another seat.