People from England speak English. People from France speak French. People from Norway speak Norwegian. People from Greece speak Greek…and so on.
Austrians speak…German. Why didn’t Austria ever develop its own indigenous language? It’s not like the Germans invaded and displaced the indigenous people with their own language & culture (as with America, Mexico, Scotland, etc.) – or was it?
Austria literally means “eastern part of the empire”; it’s not like they were founded by a people called the Austers.
It’s because Austrians are Germans. Austria is, and has been for the last eon or so, their government and region. Most Austrians consider themselves culturally and ethnically German, although as with most places in the world it’s seen significant immigration over the years, primarily from Italy or the Balkans.
Austrians call themselves Österreich … or Eastern Kingdom in German (roughly) …
Hilter was Austrian … so, yeah, they’re as German as German can be without being Dutch.
Austria and Prussia were the two biggest German kingdoms at the time Otto Von Bismarck wanted to unify Germany into one nation. His philosophy was that there was only room for one big fish in the pond. So he picked Prussia, and united it along with all the other principalities and regions and kingdoms and fiefdoms that used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire into the nation of Germany. And Austria was left out.
I’m not 100% sure Austrians consider themselves “Germans” or not these days, what with the whole Third Reich thing to distance themselves from. But up until the 20th Century, they almost certainly did consider themselves German, and everyone else did too.
Same reason Switzerland and Liechtenstein speak German - because they were speaking German before the idea of “Germany” existed. The notion of sovereign nation-states with well-defined borders is a fairly modern one. For a few thousand years Europe was a bunch of loosely-organized tribal affiliations with constantly shifting territories, fealties, and alliances.
Huh, interesting. Though it does make me wonder why they haven’t forged their own separate nationality since splitting from the HRE in 1273. Americans and Canadians certainly don’t consider themselves English.
No, but they (along with Australia and New Zealand, etc) definitely consider themselves part of the same philosophical and legal tradition as England (and the UK.) Most of the English-speaking countries aside from the US still have the same monarchy in place, even.
Well if Austria had its choice they would have joined Germany (note the huge pluralities in many Austrian districts for unification). Only the interference of the Allies stopped a German-Austrian union, until 1938 that is.
Until the 19th century, the Germanosphere was composed of dozens of independent countries. After the Napoleonic Wars, most of them joined in a loose affiliation called the German Confederation. The two dominant powers of the confederation, Prussia and the Austrian Empire, were always at odds. Religion was one of several points of contention: Austria was mostly Catholic and Prussia mostly Protestant. Language was another, with many citizens of the Austrian Empire speaking non-German languages (Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, etc.).
The brief but bloody Austro-Prussian War broke out in 1866. Austria lost the war and most of its German-speaking allies. The Peace of Prague excluded Austria from future German unification. A few years later, most former members of the German Confederation other than Austria were combined in the new German Empire. Prussia was the undisputed dominant power in the Empire.
The Anschluss of 1938 is a complicating factor.
My understanding is that the Swiss German “dialect” is effectively a separate language, and not easily comprehensible to many other German speakers. Austrian German may also not be intelligible to northern Germans, and could potentially be considered a separate language, but it normally isn’t.
Sometimes languages are given separate names in different countries, sometime they aren’t. Serbian and Croatian are basically the same language and given different names largely because they used different alphabets. Flemish is the name given to the variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium. There’s not a lot of consistency.
Err…what? Austria didn’t split from the HRE. Ever. It was a member right until its dissolution in 1806. 1273 was the year the first Habsburg HRE Rudolf I was elected, but he didn’t even get his hands on the duchy ( and associated estates ) for a few years yet and rather illegally at that. But that hardly made Austria less German, Rudolf being a good German from Swabia/south Alsace and all ;). If anything it amplified its Germaness since Ottokar II from whom Rudolf appropriated it, was the Czech king of Bohemia.
Austria wasn’t politically part of the German Empire of the Prussians in the 19th-20th century, because the Habsburgs weren’t subjects of the Prussians. But the Habsburgs were still self-consciously German. Alsace, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, the Low Countries, southern Denmark - all speak in part or whole varieties of German. Some are considered separate languages, but that again is politics. There really isn’t much overwhelming difference between Dutch and Low German - they’re really functionally dialects.
ETA: Oh and I’ll add that Habsburg Castle is today in Switzerland :). The poor Habsburgs having lost some of their home estates to the upstart Swiss by the 15th century.
My German teacher said he was teaching us “High German”, but really no Germans spoke it, rather it was a somewhat artificial blend of all the German dialects. I don’t think speaking German changes the current Austrian national identity. Nitpick on the Swiss, they speak German, French and Italian; their own dialects to be sure, but they have three official languages.
You know … technically they speak English in Glasgow … but I sure can’t understand them.
“Swiss German” is actually somewhat of an umbrella term referring to several informal High German dialects spoken in Switzerland as well as Italy and Liechtenstein. But all German-speaking Swiss also learn the formal “Swiss Standard German” which is easily understood by non-Swiss German speakers. The Standard dialect is used in all government communication, schools, news reporting, etc.
Actually four - everyone always forgets about Romansh 
Correct. Today, this is a touchy subject. The late Jörg Haider, a far-right Austrian politician, famously said that “the Austrian nation was an ideological miscarriage”. On the other hand, there is a well-known quip according to which “Ludwig van Beethoven was an Austrian and Adolf Hitler was a German”.
The assumption that nation=state=language, one and indivisible, is a relatively recent and rather limited/limiting idea. In the great historical empires (Egypt, Alexander, Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans, the Persians) rulers and ruled never necessarily shared the same language. English as we know developed after centuries of a French-speaking feudal class controlling territories and lands across most of modern France as well.
The language, culture and concept of Germany long pre-dated the idea of a German nation-state as we understand it now. The Holy Roman Empire was often referred to in German as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (as the inheritor to Charlemagnes’ Empire), though quite a few of its participant rulers ruled over those who spoke other languages. The Hapsburgs acquired huge ranges of territories* (more by dynastic marriage than conquest, it seems), and when the HRE disappeared and they reinvented themselves as the Austrian (later Austro-Hungarian) Empire, it was still a vast collection of different ruling arrangements in different territories with different languages; but the Austrian core was always of German culture. A united Germany was the latecomer.
*By chance I came across this list of the titles attributed to the Hapsburg Emperors in the 18th century:
*Karl VI, Roman Emperor and German King, King in Castile, Aragon, Leon, the Two Sicilies, in Jerusalem, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Navarre, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, Mallorca, Seville, Sardinia, Corsica, Cordoba, Murcia, Jaen, Algarve, Algeciras, Gibraltar, of the Canaries and West Indian Islands of the American Continent, and King of the Atlantic Ocean; Archduke in Austria, Duke in Burgundy, Brabant, Milan, Styria, Carinthia, Krain and Limburg, Luxembourg, Geldern, Wurttemberg, Upper and Lower Silesia, Calabria and Athens, Prince in Swabia, Catalonia and Asturias, Margrave of the Holy Roman Empire in Burgau, Moravia, Upper and Lower Lausitz, Prince-Count in Habsburg, Flanders, Tirol, Pfirt, Kieburg, Gorz and Artois, Landgrave in Alsace, Margave in Christano, Count in Namur and Roussillon, Lord of the Wendish March, in Portenau, Biscaya, Molins, Salins, Tripolis and Mechelen, *
Note that several of those titles are claimed but were never effective, Karl VI having been one of the pretenders to the inheritance of Charles II of Castille, II of Aragon, depends-how-you-count of Navarre, III of Brabant…
Nowadays the austrian self-identify not as *deutsch *(German) but as deutschsprachig (German speaking).
The sense of a separate Austrian identity definitely has much increased in the last decades. When my father worked on the construction of the Kaprun pumped storage power station in the early 1950s his colleagues referred to him as ‘from the Reich’ as opposed to ‘from Germany’.
When Austria entered the EU one of the conditions that they insisted on was a list of 23 food-related terms where the Austrian version is to be used every time when the German expression is used. For example when an EU directive references potatoes, the German-language version must name Kartoffeln (German term) but also Erdäpfel (Austrian term).
Well, “High German” is basically the German spoken around Hanover, so there are lots of people using it. As I like to explain to my English friends, I speak the Queen’s German.