The Christmas days came to a fitting conclusion on the TV station RTL, which broadcast the quiz show “Who wants to be a millionaire?” on Monday evening. has served. Moderator Günther Jauch sat there opposite a candidate who had worked as a reporter in Austria, among other things. Unfortunately, she was not accepted there, she said, because she had not mastered the idiom.
Jauch then gave a similar experience for the best. As a young man, he was looking around at the Oktoberfest on behalf of Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) and made a fatal mistake, he confessed. He named the chicken as Handel, like the composer. “It rained down on protest letters,” said Jauch, and he was also banned from using microphones for months.
Unbelievable that the BR treated its good German speaking employees so badly. Today it is rather the other way around. If a moderator reveals a southern tone of voice, it is almost inevitable that he will be ostracized on the airwaves.
Although the colloquial language in Bavaria is constantly developing in the direction of gibberish from dialect, plastic slang and mother tongue remnants from all over the world, language-sensitive people still react allergically to dialectal pronunciation errors. Even the Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann found it difficult to strike the right note. In his novel “Buddenbrooks” the hop dealer Permaneder says things like: “Dös haut scho!” and “It’s dös a Hetz!” That fits, but he also says a little oddly: “Munich is not a commercial city” and “applies to you” instead of right.
If Mann’s fellow writer André Gide had edited the work, the Buddenbrooks might not have appeared. Because as a publisher’s editor, Gide even rejected the manuscript of Marcel Proust’s novel of the century “In Search of Lost Time” after discovering a syntactical inaccuracy in a hairstyle description.
In today’s Bavaria, the uneasiness is mainly limited to the fact that Bad Reichenhall is no longer stressed on the final syllable -hall, as it has always been, and Ruhpolding is no longer stressed on Ruh-. Hans Triebel, the innkeeper of the Gotzinger drum, admonished the former general director of the state theaters, August Everding, that the Prince Regent Theater should be stressed on the first syllable, which Everding obediently heeded. Because he had already had to listen to the top dogs at the regulars’ table: “Mogst scho rucka!”