Dialects (Aimee)

For this week’s tandem lesson we discussed about the existing languages and dialects in Austria. In general, the dialects can be divided into 9 different parts because of the fact that Austria has 9 different counties which are Vorarlberg, Tirol, Steiermark, Oberösterreich, Niederösterreich, Burgenland, Kärnten, Wien und Salzburg. This is a new piece of information that I didn’t realise before talking about this with Sarah.  What’s more, every little part in Austria has its own dialect and also the dialects in villages or cities can be extremely different. For me this seemed quite strange, as back at home everyone in towns have different accents of course and to a point different dialects, but not so much so that we cannot understand each other. So this was quite an interesting aspect for me to learn. 

What I found most impressing was the fact that Sarah can understand most of them but it sometimes doesn’t work the other way round. This means that if Sarah talks in her dialect from Vorarlberg which is a county of Austria, a person from Vienna would not understand her, but if this person from Vienna speaks with her in his or her dialect (Vienna), Sarah would be able to understand most of it. 

Sarah told me about experience when some relatives from Steiermark; another part of Austria, came to visit them and Sarah had to talk in “high” German in order to let her cousin understand what she is talking about. This is very different to home as when my cousins from England come to visit, while it seems like we speak a different language with all our Northern Irish sayings, we don’t. We just have to speak slower in order for them to understand as Northern Irish people tend to speak quite fast but the language itself is no different. 

Sarah told me that when pupils start primary school they also start talking in “high” German as German is the official language in school, but that does not mean that a child under the age of 6 or 7 will never get in contact with the German language. Almost every TV programme and radio programme is held in German. Moreover, the official documents and signs on the streets would also be written in German and therefore a child is introduced to German when he or she is born.

Some differences that I learned in this lesson between these two “languages” (“high” German and an Austrian dialect)

Hello:
Austrian dialect = Zeawas
German = Hallo

Goodbye:
Austrian dialect = pfüate
German = Tschüss

Sometimes those two languages can also be mixed up and people nowadays also use some German words when talking in their dialects.
Sarah’s dialect is more similar to Swiss German because her village is located very close to the Swiss border.