Both of those could be applied to any conversational exchange, whether information was really being exchanged or not, and smalltalk is heavily weighted towards the "not".
It's not what you say, but how you say it. /exaggeration
Schwatz, Plausch, Plauderei, Tratsch? And as we're getting very informal here, local dialects take over. Which is one of the reason why "small talk", sounding a bit more high-brow, was so easily adopted.
Dear God, I don't recognise a single one of those. But what about people from areas that might have local slang but don't have a dialect, like Niedersachsen or (bits of) the Rhineland? And what about the university attending classes, who are much more likely to become free-floating German instead of being rooted to anyplace particular?
