Mother's Milk

Pretty much every post on this blog mentions Dialekt in some way. I’m fascinated by it – the way in which an entire country can speak counterhegemonically. This isn’t the German you learn in German class, or on TV or in films. It exists solely in the mouths and media of the people who speak it, who aren’t exactly well-known the world over. Had I not come to Austria, I probably wouldn’t even know that Austrian dialect exists. And Schwiizerdüütsch – the dialect spoken in Switzerland – still remains the stuff of legend for me. I’ve heard Austrians attempt to mimic it, which is where my knowledge of the word “Schwiizerdüütsch” (Hochdeutsch would be Schweizerdeutsch) comes from, but I’ve never heard it spoken by an actual Schweizer. (I did, however, hear a guest lecture by a Swiss person attempting to speak Hochdeutsch last week, and that was enough to convince me that Schweizerdeutsch is indeed an entirely different animal.)

Yes, Dialekt is something special, and it’s something that, as the expression goes, really needs to be passed on with the mother’s milk for perfect mastery. But there’s one group of Austrians that doesn’t speak Dialekt with the same fluency as everyone else. And oddly enough, they’re the ones for whom the sacred rite of Dialekt-through-breastfeeding occurred in the not-so-distant past. I’m talking about toddlers.

It was something I had noticed so many times on the playgrounds and Öffis without understanding why – very young children don’t speak Dialekt. For example, Austrians almost never say “zwei” (2); they shorten it to “zwa.” But Austrian children, like children the world over, love to count, and you’ll hear their high-pitched voices throughout the city, reciting “eins, zwei, drei, vier” in perfect Hochdeutsch! At first, this didn’t make any sense to me. These toddlers haven’t learned to read and thus have no knowledge of standard written German, so how on Earth are they the only ones in all of Austria who speak it?

And then, in a conversation with Ruth, the director of the Central College Abroad program, who has a young daughter, I finally figured it out: Fernsehdeutsch. As Austrians will quickly retort in response to any comments about their accents, Hochdeutsch is spoken natively in only one place: TV-Land.* And when little Austrians learn to count, they learn it not from their Dialekt-speaking parents but from Dora, Elmo, and all the rest. And on Austrian television, Dora’s native language is not Spanish but Hochdeutsch.

During my four months in America, I tried to keep up my German skills by watching films and TV shows in German. And my vocabulary did expand – but not in the way I wanted it to. Television teaches you “gucken” instead of “schauen,” (look), “nee” instead of “na” (informal no), “Karotten” instead of “Möhren” (carrots), and so on. I ended up losing my hard-won Austrian pronunciation and had even started to use some of the German expressions. “Das muss ich mal gucken” (“I’ll have to check that out”), I told one of my Austrian friends here my first week back. “Googeln?” (Google it?), he replied. “Nee,” I responded, “gucken.” Then, realizing where I was, I corrected my mistake with a quick “Na, des muss i mal schauen, hob i gemeint.”

Slowly, as my experiences with street-Deutsch begin to outweigh my experiences with Fernsehdeutsch, I am regaining my Austrian patterns of speech, and even learning some new ones. (The people in my new dorm say “Oida” – a flavoring particle similar to “yo” – much more than the people in my old dorm, so I’m beginning to pick that up.)

I wonder if a similar process is what gets little Austrians to drop the Fernsehdeutsch as well. They are sometimes “corrected” when they use the German phrases -- as Ruth did when her daughter said “Guck mal, Mama!” (“Honey, we don’t say that here. We say 'Schau mal.'”) – and sometimes parents “translate” the German children’s books so that they use Austrian vocabulary. But the main teaching method is experience: living in Austria and hearing the way Austrian German is spoken. So that, by the time they hit age 15 and 16, they can go on shows like Teenager werden Mütter (yes, there’s an Austrian version of 16 and Pregnant) and Saturday Night Fever and strike fear in the hearts of language purists. Because even though the young people on these shows are coming at you from your Fernseher, what they are speaking is perhaps the farthest thing imaginable from Fernsehdeutsch. And so it comes full circle.


* As in, the Piefkes don't speak "correctly" either, so quit your belly-aching.