How Different Are Standard German and Bavarian???

Hi everyone. I hope you like the video! There's a little mixup in one part of the video starting at 7:47. The word-for-word translation says that "heute" means "hot" and that "heiß" means today, but it's actually the other way around: "heute" means "today" and "heiß" means "hot". Check out the excellent German course "German Uncovered": ▶ bit.ly/Uncovered-German ◀ See "Uncovered" courses for all languages: ▶ bit.ly/3fYI1uo ◀ Disclosure: If you upgrade to a paid course, Langfocus gets a small referral fee that helps support this channel.

I'm a Bavarian and once went to Berlin into a restaurant. I forgot to speak standard german, and accidentally ordered in Bavarian. The waitress asked "Do you speak English please?"

Kind of fun story: I learnt 'German' from my grandparents, who grew up in Austria, speaking Bavarian. I didn't know that that was totally different to Standard German, so I rocked up at my secondary school German class super confident. 11 year old me tried to impress the teacher by having a conversation with her in German, only for her not to have much of a clue what I was saying because I was speaking Bavarian. That sent my brain into a bit of a vortex for a while there.

Bavarian here who grew up in rural Ireland. I once had German tourists pull over and ask me (In English) for directions (I was wearing my school uniform so they assumed I was local). They had a northern German licence plate so I figured they wouldn’t really understand Bavarian, so I gave them the directions in Bavarian. They said they were sorry but that they couldn’t speak Irish Gaelic. Won’t ever forget that.

I'm Austrian and my fiancé is Dutch, she says our dialect sounds like "farmer's german". I find that description to be annoyingly accurate.

How am I supposed to understand German when Germans can’t even understand German

As a south-tyriolian i can say that every village has his own dialect.

It's interesting that the word for ''hello'' in Bavarian it's ''servus'', which is like latin (the person who serve). In italian the word for hello is ''ciao'' derived from Venetian ''sciavo'' (schiavo) which means slave. serve and slave (servo e schiavo) were pretty much synonims so i spotted a correlation. Both word (servus, ciao) are the short form of ''i'm at your service''

I‘m a polish guy living in the deepest part of Bavaria called "Niederbayern" and I love when they say " Es ist mir Wurst" which exactly means "This is sausage for me" BUT they use this expression for "I don’t care 🤷🏼 or it doesn’t matter" .

I give this the highest form of approval in Bavarian: "basst scho"

I once was hiking in Scotland when I was approached by two guys. They asked, in the most germanic accent imaginable, where the nearest campsite was. I asked "Are you german?". When they said they were, I said "Na, dann können wir ja auch Deutsch reden!" (Then we can talk german!) They had such a thick Bavarian accent, I had to go back to English. I am german.

SG: "Als ich ankam, hatten sie noch nichts gegessen." Bav: "Warum is´n no soviel vom Leberkas do? Is der schlecht?"

Diese Kommentarsektion ist nun Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschl- ah na, Moment... Der Kommentarbereich ghead iaz unsam Kini Ludwig II. und am Freistaat Bayern!

Hey, I don't say it that way!

Der Kollege der die hochdeutschen Wörter einspricht ist viel zu motiviert

Thank you for this lovely video I just re-discovered! I grew up in Bavaria, left at age 19. Spent the next 38 years living in English speaking countries (Australia, USA and Scotland), speaking VERY little German, and forgetting more and more of my mother-tonge! I arrived back in Germany very recently (along with my Aussie husband), nervous about sounding like an idiot, because apparently, my Bavarian still sounds 100% flawless - nobody detects an accent. However, my language skills are still that of a very young person, (i.e. I'm not entirely familiar with many "adult" terms (such as regarding taxes, insurance, mortgage, health issues, etc etc etc), and on top of that, 38 years have changed the German language A LOT!!!! As a result, I must sometimes/often come across as a "local" moron :-( Anyway..... I still understand nearly everything, and speak it well enough - especially Bavarian. I am now re-disccovering my roots and upbringing. I have developed a new appreciation of my native dialect - it is so rich, so full of nuances, so much deeper, funnier, and richer than standard German! There is so much humour and amazing detail that can't come across in "Hochdeutsch". I feel blessed that I understand and speak this wonderful dialect! Thank you very much for not poking fun at us "Bauernfünfer" (the "Preissn" like to portray us as simpletons), but to simply state differences without judgement.

Great analysis Paul. My mother-in-law left Vienna in 1950 as a war bride. Twenty years ago we traveled across Germany to Vienna with my son and his German friends. Our companions were from Hanover, but my mother-in-law spoke only English to them until we got to the eastern edge of Bavaria. There one of our companions’ brother-in-law who spoke her dialect joined us. Suddenly she became lively and talkative. She explained later that she had not spoken Standard German since leaving school at age 14. Now I understand a bit better her language difficulties.

German: „In diesem Aspekt kann ich Ihnen in vollen Umfang zustimmen!“ Bavarian: „Scho.“

I studied german for 4 or 5 years and I find amazing that there are so many dialects and germans can speak both SG and their own dialect, changing from one to the other naturally. Living in a big country where everybody speaks the same language, that sounds amazing to me. Once when I was in the train from Vienna to Venice, I couldn't understand what one family was speaking to one another and I felt so sad that I had spent so many years and money learning german and couldn't understand a word. Then a good soul told me that they were probably talking dialect. That saved my day. Deutsch ist die Sprache, die ich als eine dritte Sprache ausgewählt habe zu lernen. Sehr stolz dass ich ein bisschen Deutsch kann.

I'm Tyrolean (Western Austria) and I want to stress two things again: 1. This dialect is really a spectrum. So the dialect described in the video would be the "pure form" (of one specific variation within the Bavarian dialect group) but hardly anyone actually speaks like that, most people mix it up with Standard German to various degrees. I for example do use the Genitive sometimes and I never use double negatives, I also (like most Austrians) don't roll my R. 2. It's important to know that there's a difference between "Bavarian Dialect Group" and "Bavarian". The different Austrian dialects (except the one in Vorarlberg, it is in the same Group as Swiss German and the dialect spoken in Baden-Württemberg) belong to the Bavarian dialect group but aren't Bavarian. The word Bavarian is usually only used to refer to the dialect spoken in Bavaria specifically. Within this group there are many, many variations and usually within the variations there are variations again, so basically in every town people will speak a bit differently (and as I said every person speaks a bit differently too). And while all those dialects belong to one group, they're really, really different. In my opinion, people from Vienna/Eastern Austria don't sound like (actual) Bavarians AT ALL. People like me from Western Austria speak more similarly to Bavarians, but there's still a significant difference.