Austro-Bavarian Language

They are called "upper" because they are spoken in Switzerland, Austria and southern Germany, which are mountainous. Like standard German, Austro-Bavarian is a High German language, but they are not the same language. However, Austro-Bavarian and Standard German have influenced each other and the vast majority of Austro-Bavarian speakers speak Standard German as well. There are more variants of Bavarian. The variants are Central Bavarian, Southern Bavarian, and Northern Bavarian.

Austro-Bavarian
Bairisch
Pronunciation	German [baɪʁɪʃ]
Region	Austria, Bavaria, and South Tyrol
Ethnicity	Austrians Bavarians South Tyroleans
Native speakers	14,000,000 (2016)
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Elbe Germanic High German Upper German Austro-Bavarian
Language codes
ISO 639-3	bar
Glottolog	baye1239  Bairisch bava1246  Bavarian
Extent of the Austro-Bavarian language
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Austro-Bavarian is also used to refer to the dialect group which includes the Austro-Bavarian dialect discussed here, as well as the Cimbrian, Hutterite German, and Mócheno dialects of Germany.

The Austro-Bavarian language has its origins in the Germanic tribe known as the Bavarii, who established a tribal duchy, which covered much of what is today Bavaria and some of Austria in the early Middle Ages and was eventually subdued by Charlemagne. However, they gradually migrated down the Danube and into the Alps to all those areas where Austro-Bavarian dialects are spoken.

In German, there is usually a difference made between "bairisch" (referring to the language) and "bayerisch" (referring to the state of Bavaria and used in the name of BMW). Because of King Ludwig I's passion for everything Hellenic, the German name for Bavaria today is spelled "Bayern", while the language spoken there has retained its original spelling "Bairisch"—note the I versus the "Hellenic" Y.

• in Bavaria:
  • in Upper Bavaria
  • in Lower Bavaria
  • in the Upper Palatinate
• in Austria:
  • in all parts of the country except the federal-state of Vorarlberg and parts of the Reutte District in Tirol, where an Alemannic dialect is spoken.
• in Switzerland:
  • in the village of Samnaun, in Graubünden.
• in Italy:
  • in all of the province of South Tyrol and by small German speaking communities in Trento, Veneto (Cimbrian language) and Friuli.
• in Hungary:
  • the city of Sopron (Ödenburg) is officially bi-lingual.

Consonants

Notes:

• The phoneme /h/ is frequently realised as [ç] or [x] word-internally and is realised as [h] word-initially.
• Intervocalic /s/ can be voiced to [z].
• A trill sound /r/ may also be realised as a tap sound [ɾ].
• Intervocalic /v/ or /w/ sound can be realised as [ʋ] or [β, w].
• Some dialects, such as the Bavarian dialect in South Tyrol, realise /k/ as an affricate [k͡x] word-initially and before /m, n, l, r/, which is an extension of the High German consonant shift to velar consonants.

Vowels

• Austrian German
• Viennese German
• German language