[barry-cotter]

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

[mhd]

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.

[barry-cotter]

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?

[mhd]

Germans from beyond the Danube are cold heartless people who don't chat. No, seriously, I'm not really an expert when it comes to dialects, and there doesn't seem to be a proper etymological German dictionary online. And just because they don't appear to have a dialect (which is wrong anyway, it's just that their dialect is now "proper" German) doesn't meant that there aren't slang words. And it seems that a lot of the words for chit-chat area onomatopoeic...

Just saying that there are words for mindless chatter that don't mean gossip per se (i.e gossipy "Klatsch" vs. chatty "Tratsch").

[lispm]

No, 'sich mit jemanden unterhalten', is smalltalk. 'Konversation treiben' is a form of that. In Hamburg 'schnackt man mit jemanden'.