In the past, if you ordered a cold cut from the butcher, the saleswoman would give you “a mess for a fiver.” When the new school year began on Tuesday, there was also chaos, but more of an emotional one. Young mothers complained on the radio, gasping for breath, that they had hardly slept and were even more nervous than their first-graders. Teachers also sighed that there was a “huge excitement” in the schools.
Until a few decades ago, parents in rural areas had no time to worry about school or even to worry about sensitivities. At most, they took a look at the annual report and were happy because the children now had vacation and were available to work.
However, language skills were a concern. Somehow it got through that people should speak differently at school than at home in the village. “Geij Bou, that you’re smacking your lips!” That maternal admonition, which the author Josef Fendl immortalized in literature, became a virtual vade mecum for tens of thousands of children.
In the 1970s, sociologists and representatives of similar spooky sciences prophesied a dire future for all village children. It was said that their dialect was a barrier to education. Nobody questioned why dialect-speaking writers and parliamentary speakers such as Oskar Maria Graf, Lena Christ, Lion Feuchtwanger, Georg Eisenberger and Sepp Daxenberger achieved great linguistic mastery.
Instead, the academic Gscheithaferl provoked an educational policy disaster. Many parents, educators and teachers are still spreading the theorists’ nonsense today and ignoring the fact that children become smarter the more language variants they master.
The 15th Bavarian-Austrian dialectology conference has just ended in Munich, at which the state-forced demise of southern German language varieties was also discussed. Nevertheless, there was a calmness there that made it easy to get to the essence of language and being and to calmly captivate the audience with mysteries such as the consonant length in appellatives and the pleasure congruence of number words. A small ray of hope in this incredibly excited world.