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.

Ode to Österreich

The first time I went abroad, my answer to "Why did you decide to come to Austria?" was simple. It was the result of a set of coincidences: I took German because I didn't like the Spanish teacher (and then fell in love with the language) and went to Austria because the German academic calendar didn't mesh with Harvard's (and then fell in love with the country.) But I could have gone anywhere this summer, and I chose to come back.  And that requires explanation. I was actually asked three times this week why I love Austria so much, and I think I mumbled something about Dirndls and Dialekt. But here's the real answer, my ode to Österreich in five movements. (I tried to select things that everyone can appreciate about Austria. There are of course other, smaller things that I have fallen in love with but that I realize are very subjective. For a list of those, see this post -- written in January but not published until now!)

There are many paths to development. Some of them are for bikes.

One of my goals for this summer is to finally get around to visiting some of the museums that I didn't during my last trip to Vienna. At the time, I told myself this was because I had decided to concentrate on meeting Austrians more than "seeing" Austria. But, if I'm being honest with myself, I spent more time on Facebook than was probably necessary. On many occasions, I wasn't doing anything but was simply too lazy to get bundled up and leave my dorm to go do something. Today, though, was sunny and not overly warm, so I had no excuses. I decided to visit the Museum für Völkerkunde (anthropology). And I would bike there.

Prater Unser

Das Grätzl – your neighborhood or community, a smaller and less top-down way of dividing up the city than the Bezirk system – is incredibly important to Austrians. It’s one way of making a city of 1.8 million people feel smaller and less anomic, and it’s rare for Austrians to move out of their district to another, more foreign part of the city. 

Genau!

I was searching Google for an explanation of why Austrians put corn on their pizza when I found this simply hilarious blog about living as an American in the German-speaking world. Although I've found that Austrians actually eat slower than Americans, I still found the following post about sharing meals with German speakers to really hit the nail on the head.

Bist du ein Native Speaker?

There was a Dutch psychologist visiting our Institut last week, which gave me a chance to experience another aspect of European work culture, namely its largely international flavor. Europe is really pouring its heart into the whole European Union thing, by and large, and I'm constantly amazed by the large diversity of Europe-wide initiatives. ERASMUS, the student exchange program and general network of European universities, is an excellent example of this, and meeting students from all over the continent during an ERASMUS semester is quickly becoming a rite of passage for European students (it even has its own cult film!)

Yours, Formally

German, like many other languages around the world but unlike English, has two ways of saying you: "du" (informal) and "Sie" (formal).* In your first-level language class, you complain about having to learn the extra conjugation, but this is only a minor annoyance, you think, in a language with many major ones. Then you start living in the German-speaking world, and you realize that even though you can conjugate both forms, you don't have the foggiest idea of how to use them.