Tag: bairisch

Celebrating the local dialect

The weekend before last was the Mundart Festival in Regensburg. Apparently this is something that happens here, periodically, but we’ve never noticed it before.

Check out the announcer guy in the video below: this is the flavor of Bairisch native to Regensburg. That’s what you hear at work (to a certain percentage) and what you hear on the street, at the markets, and among neighbors. It sure ain’t what you learn at the Volkshochschule. Continue reading Celebrating the local dialect

Couple wordsy things and a relaxing Saturday morning

Several “foreign” visitors to the region — and by that I mean non-native speakers of German who learned their German in other regions — have mentioned that they find the German spoken here to vary from disconcerting to bewildering to unrecognizable. At several meetups, we’ve commented on how refreshing it is to hear natives speak German in areas where the spoken dialect is closer to the dialect we learned in classroom instruction. Continue reading Couple wordsy things and a relaxing Saturday morning

It’s like St. Patrick’s Day

Everyone’s Bavarian at Oktoberfest!

To help get you in the mood for the festivities, Sixt has come up with this site. As I recall from some of our non-Bavarian WEBUM conversations, Bavarian is still a mystery in many an experienced expatriate mind.

Here are some rules, off the cuff, using the examples from that Sixt promo:

  • Don’t use ü if you can help it. Sometimes you’ll see it converted to ia as in “Griaß eich” (stressed), sometimes it’s converted to a simple ‘u’ as in “zruck” (unstressed).
  • “eu” generally becomes “ei.” Also as in “Griaß eich.” (Figured it out yet? It’s “Grüßt euch!“) And have you ever wondered what a Preis is?
  • Forget everything you learned about voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs: g becomes interchangeable with c/k, t with d, and b with p.
  • The letter ‘L’ following a stressed syllable is often (usually) converted to an ‘i’, and thus, “willst” becomes “wuisd” “holen” becomes “hoin”
  • ‘ich’ and ‘mich’ and ‘dich’ are shortened respectively to ‘i’, ‘mi’ and ‘di.’
  • The ‘ah’ sound of ‘mag’ drops down lower to ‘mog’, and that’s why you see those heart-shaped gingerbread cookies that say “i mog di.” This is also observable in words like “wagen” and “sagen” (“wong” and “song”). Note the consonants melting together there, too.
  • Lots of trailing r’s become a’s – like as in “zua”
  • “ö” is at least sometimes converted to “ee” &mash; as in “schee!” (“schön!“)
  • “An” as separable prefix generally becomes “o” and the past participle prefix “ge-” is generally avoided — which is where Obatzda comes from (“Angebatzter“, presumably).

There you go. Prost!