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Yesterday I stumbled upon this infographic showing the 100 most spoken languages in the world.

It says that Bavarian has 14,359,000 (total) speakers, which makes it the 80th most spoken language in the world.

For me Bavarian was always some kind of dialect spoken in Bavaria. Why is it seen as a language? Are the numbers correct?

Also see this Wikipedia article, where Bavarian is at the 72nd place: [List of languages by number of native speakers].(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers)

EDIT:

Thx to @DavidVoigt & @HubertSchölnast for pointing out that Bavarian includes a cluster of dialects spoken in Bavaria, Austria, and South Tyrol.

These infographic's data are from Ethnologue, an annual publication that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world published by SIL International. Funny enough English Wikipedia cites it with 14,000,000 speakers (2016), while German Wikipedia cites it with ~12,000,000 speakers (2017).

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mtwde
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    Interestingly, they claim that Bavarian has more natives speakers (14,359,000) than people living in Bavaria (13.076.721) and people that learned it later on, which I find highly disputable. The source 'en.wikipedia.org' is obviously garbage, ethnologue at least claims to get their data from various publications but I can't seem to access it without paying a huge fee. I would use caution with this info-sheet. (Also, there are less native Standard German speakers than inhabitans of Germany, which makes me doubt this as well). At least, there seems to be some arbitrariness considering dialects. – infinitezero Feb 08 '20 at 12:33
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    I think this might be a misconception between Bayrisch and Bairisch. – infinitezero Feb 08 '20 at 12:54
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    To your question about language <--> dialect: There is no qualitative characteristic to distiguish between these two. If two idioms are quite similar, they are considered different dialects, if the differences are bigger, they are seen as different languages – Volker Landgraf Feb 08 '20 at 16:50
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    @VolkerLandgraf To make this kind of list that places Bavarian in the 72th, 80th, or whatever specific place, one needs to have a way to tell when two versions of Mandarin Chinese/German/Tagalog/... are a different language or not. Although there might not be a universally accepted exact definition, The Ethnologue should explain somewhere how they made the decisions to come up with this particular list. – JiK Feb 09 '20 at 19:54
  • @VolkerLandgraf ... or if there are political reasons to consider them languages rather than a dialect continuum (e.g. Danish, Norwegian, Swedish). – 0xC0000022L Feb 10 '20 at 13:06
  • Well, if we assume most Bavarian Germans speak Bavarian, and that there are plenty other south Germans that can speak it... – rackandboneman Feb 10 '20 at 19:36
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    @0xC0000022L Sure. In some other thread about this topic someone quoted something like a language is a dialect that has an army and a fleet – Volker Landgraf Feb 11 '20 at 12:39
  • It's perhaps worth noting that the chart suggests that many languages (such as Romanian) don't have a single non-native speaker. – Kyralessa Jul 14 '23 at 10:43

1 Answers1

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I don't want to discuss the difference between languages and dialects. German is a pluricentric language, which means, that there is not "a" single German. Through all the centuries from proto German up to now there never was only one German language or dialect. The situation is similar to the many branches of Arabic language, or Portuguese or also English.

The majority of linguists see Bavarian as one big group of German dialects, but maybe some other have reason to define it as a Germanic language. This situation is opposite for Lower German (spoken in the north of Germany), which is classified as a unique language by most linguists, while some say its a group of German dialects.

Look at former Yugoslavia: In the 1990ies most of the people there spoke one language which was called Serbo-Croatian. Today, we count 4 languages that was classified as variations of Serbo-Croatian 25 years ago, although they didn't change very much in those few years: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. The linguistic situation didn't change much, but the political situation did, and so within a few years one language became four distinct languages.

I don't know if the difference between Bavarian and other German dialect groups is bigger or smaller than the difference between the languages spoken in former Yugoslavia, but you can see, that it often can be complicated to say what is a dialect and what is a distinct language.

How different is Bavarian from Standard German?

Standard German has four grammatical cases, Bavarian has only three, some say it even has only two cases. This of course is oversimplified, but genitive case is used so rarely in Bavarian, that it is not really wrong to say that Bavarian has no genitive case. My first language was a Bavarian dialect, and I had to learn standard German in school, because nobody in the area where I lived spoke standard German in daily life. And so the concept of Genitive case seemed very strange to me.

Example:

  • Bavarian:

    Des do drüm is n Fodan sei Haus.

  • Standard German vocabulary with Bavarian grammar:

    Das da drüben ist dem Vater sein Haus.

  • Correct Standard German:

    Das da drüben ist des Vaters Haus. (outdated word order)
    Das da drüben ist das Haus des Vaters. (modern word order)

In Bavarian also dative and accusative case are very often merged together to one case. This is the reason why many native Bavarian speaker still have difficulties to use the correct case when trying to speak standard German.

  • Bavarian:

    Des kheat mein Buam.
    I siach mein Buam.

  • Standard German:

    Das gehört meinem Sohn. (literally: ... meinem Buben/Jungen).
    Ich sehe meinen Sohn. (... meinen Buben/Jungen).

And, as you can see from the examples above, not only the grammar is different, but also the vocabulary. But still Bavarian and Standard German are very closely related.

Who is speaking Bavarian?

Bavarian is a class of dialects (or maybe even a language?) that is spoken in most parts of Bavaria and in most parts of Austria and in South Tyrol which is part of Italy.

Bavaria is one of the 16 states of Germany. 13 million people are living in Bavaria. But many of the people living in this state are Frankonian who don't speak Bavarian.

Austria is a country that consists of 9 states. In 8 of them people are mainly speaking some bavarian dialect. Austria has 8.9 million citizens, and the one non-Bavarian state is Vorarlberg where 0.4 million people are living. Most of the people living in the 8 other states do speak bavarian dialects, but there are also many people living in Austria who speak other languages or dialects. (0.2 million People from Germany live in Austria, but also many people from Serbia, Turkey and many other countries.)

South Tyrol has 0.5 million people, but since it became part of Italy about 100 years ago, at the end of WW I, there are many people in South Tyrol speaking Italien now.

So, all together the number of 14.4 million people speaking Bavarian seems very plausible to me.

Addendum

Boarisch (Bavarian) is also one of the languages in which Wikipedia is available. For example there is an article about Bavarian language/Dialects avaiable in:

English Wikipedia contains 6M articles, German Wikipedia 2.4M, while Bavarian has 30K articles.

But Wikipedia is available in 15 different variations/dialects of German, they are listed here: Wikipedia:Sprachen Meist kleinere Wikipedias aus Mitteleuropa (Sorry, the article about language versions of Wikipedia is available in more than 50 languages, but English is not one of them.)

Hubert Schölnast
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  • "Des do drüm is n Fodan sei Haus." should be Des do drüm is dem/meim/am Fodan sei Haus. n doesn't ever fit well. – πάντα ῥεῖ Feb 08 '20 at 14:38
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    @πάνταῥεῖ: I am talking about here about my first language, i.e. the language that I learned as a baby from my parents. I am a native speaker of a Bavarian dialect. Bavarian is subdivided in Upper Palatine or North Bavarian (Oberpfälzisch oder Nordbairisch), Danube Bavarian or Middle Bavarian (Donaubayrisch oder Mittelbairisch) and Alpine Bavarian or South Bavarian (Alpenbayrisch oder Südbairisch). The largest Subgroup is Danube/Middle Bavarian which spreads over the souther parts of Bavaria and northern and eastern parts of Austria, but Danube Bavarian still is not one Dialect. ... – Hubert Schölnast Feb 08 '20 at 19:26
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    ... It is a group of an continuous spectrum of dialects. I live in the eastern part of Austria, and here *n* is a full word. Maybe it is not in other areas where Bavarian dialects are spoken. – Hubert Schölnast Feb 08 '20 at 19:27
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    OK, accepted. I am an inclusive person (region is southern east bavaria / Rosenheim). – πάντα ῥεῖ Feb 08 '20 at 19:39
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    Prima, jetzt brauchen wir noch eine präzise Betrachtung der 79 Sprachen, die von mehr Leuten gesprochen werden und der Sprachen, die von weniger Leuten gesprochen werden bis zu dem Punkt, dass weniger als 14,4 Mio. übrig bleiben. ;) – user unknown Feb 09 '20 at 14:54
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    Super interesting response Hubert. Bavarian is also my mother tongue. I would say it "Des da driam is an Fatta sei Haus." – Christian Feb 09 '20 at 20:41
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    @Christian as a pure additional data point that's also what I would be saying. But then I spent a large part of my youth where you could tell which town or village someone was from by the choice of certain dialect words, so there would be minor variations. During my school years dialect wasn't yet discouraged (it breaks my heart how many of the kids of my old friends sound like they're from Hannover and couldn't speak Bavarian with a gun to their heads), so we ended up with a Bavarian hybrid specific to our area. :) –  Feb 10 '20 at 08:57
  • Root cause would be that in earlier times (tribal / early middle-age) so few people visited other parts of the country, that language evolved isolated village-vise, even in the very next village people used different vocables to address the very same item. Schools didn't change much about that, until general rules were introduced that regulated language and its use (creating orthographic and grammatical rules as well as unified collections of vocables [i.e. Duden for German]) – eagle275 Feb 10 '20 at 14:35
  • Great answer, Hubert. Out of curiosity (and cc @Christian): could you explain why "n Fodan / an Fatta / dem Vater" is translated to "meines Vaters" and not "des Vaters"? Is there really something in that sentence (and not in context) that tells us the speaker is talking about his father and not somebody's father? – Matthias Feb 14 '20 at 23:06
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    @Matthias: You are right. Des is n Fodan sein Haus = Das ist dem Vater sein Haus. = Das ist das Haus des Vaters. | Des is mein Fodan sein Haus = Das ist meinem Vater sein Haus. = Das ist das Haus meines Vaters. I corrected my posting. – Hubert Schölnast Feb 15 '20 at 18:59
  • @Matthias As I am a true bavarian, I have no clue about whatever you mean with "des Vaters" and "meines Vaters". ;-) However, I would translated "meines Vaters" into "mein Fattan sei Haus is abbrennt". It is probably more closely. Anyway, Germany grammar sucks. I will never learn it. – Christian Feb 16 '20 at 17:48
  • Als kleine Bierdeckelrechnung werden bairische Dialekte in drei der sieben Regierungsbezirke Bayerns gesprochen (Oberbayern, Niederbayern und Oberpfalz); diese machen ca. 33 von den ca. 70 Millionen Quadratkilometern des Freistaats aus, in denen etwa 7 von 13 Millionen Einwohner wohnen. Das deckt zwar nicht 100 % des bairischen Sprachgebiets in Deutschland ab, aber da es umgekehrt auch einige nichtbairische Gebiete einschließt, ist der Rückschluss erlaubt, dass Bairisch in maximal der Hälfte des Freistaats gesprochen wird. – Jan Feb 21 '20 at 09:32
  • "nobody in the area where I lived spoke standard German in daily life" -- What about cartoons, films, TV? Were they in Bavarian also, or did you not watch them? –  May 06 '22 at 22:41
  • I'm curious if the same words in Standard German and Bavarian always have the same genders. –  May 06 '22 at 22:45
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    @MWB: about the influence of TV: I was born in 1965. My dad bought a TV set in 1969, when I was 4 years old to watch the Apollo 11 mission (landing on the moon) which was a very big event, because none of our neighbors did have TV. They all came to us. The house was filled with our neighbors, thick clouds of cigarette smoke wafted through the living room while we were staring at a 30x40cm flickering grayscale TV show. TV had 2 programs in those days and they started to broadcast at 5 pm and ended at about 10 or 11 pm. There were only 2 TV shows for children, one on Wednesdays, the ... – Hubert Schölnast May 07 '22 at 07:59
  • ... other Saturdays, each less than 30 minutes long. So, we kids did not spend much time watching TV when I was young. And my parents used to listen to a radio station that played traditional regional folkloric music, and the text part of this station was sometimes standard German (for news and anouncements) but also very often in the local dialect. I remeber that there was a show where dialect poets read their texts, and I was always very proud when I heard my Grandfather read one of his dialect texts. – Hubert Schölnast May 07 '22 at 07:59
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    @MWB: about bavarian Genders: There are many words that have different genders in Austrian and German Standard German (in Germany: der Joghurt, das Gummi, die Cola, der Keks; in Austria: das Joghurt, der Gummi, das Cola, das Keks). But there are also many words where the genders are different between Austrian Standard German and the local dialect: Standard: die Butter, das Radio; in Styria, where I grew up: der Butter, der Radio. Standard: der Pool, in Lower Austria, where I live now: das Pool. – Hubert Schölnast May 07 '22 at 07:59
  • @MWB: You are asking many questions in comments. This is not what comments are made for. I really would like to answer these and other questions, but please ask them as proper questions: https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/ask – Hubert Schölnast May 08 '22 at 20:47