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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Austrian [was: Re: An angloid is not a grotesquely formed non-Latino?
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Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 02:04:46 GMT
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In article <4kdq86$46e@bone.think.com>, Daan Sandee <sandee@Think.COM> wrote:

>(The German spoken in Austria is much closer to standard German than
>American English is to British English.  The accent is very different,
>but not more so than the various accents heard in Germany differ from
>each other.)

Had you said "written" instead of "spoken", I would have agreed with
you.  The dialects of Austria form a continuum with the dialects of
Bavaria, but these are themselves very different from the standard
(as any North German arriving in Munich notices pretty quickly).
And the difference is more than simply one of accent.  When
Austria entred the EU, it submitted a list of "Austriazismen"
which were to be used in official documents alongside their German 
counterparts.  Much as Oxford publishes the Oxford Dictionary of 
American English, Duden publishes an entire 252 page guide (_Wie sagt 
man in Oesterreich?_) to Austrian German.

And this is just for differences in the standard registers.  Anyone
who has tried to read Nestroy or Hofmannsthal (or listened to Falco
or EAV) will be able to tell you that the colloquial ones are much 
tougher going.  Of course, Austrian standard German have grown closer 
together since they wrote, but so have American and British English 
(and the various dialects of British). 

Of course, as there are no commonly-accepted criteria for judging the 
"closeness" of different dialects, any estimation of whether any two 
dialects of one language are more similar than any two dialects of 
another is basically subjective.  Still, it only stands to reason that 
the various dialects of German have diverged more in over a millenium of 
independent development than the dialects English have in a fourth of one.




-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
