The president of the state parliament caused a stir at the Gäuboden folk festival because she appeared at the award ceremony in a highly festive rogue. In doing so, she emphasizes that she is linguistically and fashionably immune to challenges of any kind.
A stroll through the Gäuboden folk festival over the weekend made it clear that the turmoil of the course of the world can also be seen in the fashion taste of the visitors. A not insignificant crowd of visitors showed signs of their mental disorientation with deliberately terrible costumes and tattoos. The President of the State Parliament, Ilse Aigner, appeared all the more relaxed. She caused a stir when she elegantly pushed her way through the crowd in her traditional costume, a highly festive rogue. As the patron of a costume festival, she rushed from Valley directly to Straubing on Sunday without changing her clothes, where she was presented with the Bavarian language root.
The award is given every year to celebrities who speak Bavarian on official occasions. Ilse Aigner fulfilled this criterion in the BR television series “Gipfeltreffen”, as Sepp Obermeier, the inventor of the prize, explained. As a “demonstration of central Bavarian primary competence” in public, Obermeier also acknowledged Aigner’s video appeal for International Mother Language Day. And even as Federal Minister of Agriculture, she confidently handed over her language business card in Berlin.
Obermeier said that fortunately the times in the state parliament when dialects were branded as an educational deficit are over. When the SPD parliamentary group had to appoint the chair of the education committee in 2002 and Marianne Schieder from Upper Palatinate was about to win the election, her own parliamentary group still brazenly rumored that the lawyer (with the 1st and 2nd state exam!) could not articulate herself in standard language. Today, according to Obermeier, one orients oneself more towards people like Konrad Adenauer, who in 1963 after the ratification of the Élysée Treaty babbled in his Cologne dialect: “Minge Fründ der Herr Dejohl häd jesaht” – my friend Herr de Gaulle said . . .”
Wolfgang A. Herrmann, President Emeritus of the Technical University of Munich, delivered the laudatory speech in dialect, of course. He honored the politician from the district of Rosenheim as an ambassador of Central Bavaria with nationwide charisma. Even in the standard language, you keep the beautiful Bavarian pronunciation. While the speech of many top politicians and celebrities – analogous to the increasingly uniform looking inner cities – becomes interchangeable, Aigner’s demeanor testifies to authenticity and down-to-earthness. Their language is semantically more nuanced and therefore more expressive than standard German.
In the Straubing theater foyer, Aigner, Obermeier and Herrmann ignited a firework of linguistic variety in their speeches and counter-speech, they dished up words like Kracherl and Plafond, which caused the audience to sigh comfortably (“mei, it’s been a long time!”). And Aigner’s favorite word? “Good snow,” she said. This is also a unique selling point and an indication that the politician is linguistically and fashionably immune to challenges of any kind.