A mom from the Dingolfing area, overworked by the noise of children, recently ventured loudly: “Yes, we gor nia ned koa ruah ned!” She scolded. With the help of a quadruple negative, she energetically emphasized her rebuke, a trick that only works in dialect. A brewery from Markt Schwaben, which markets its light beer like the biblical manna: “Mia ham no nia ned nothing else ned drunga!”
Granted, it sounds like the copywriter suffered from grammatical insufficiency. But these sentences follow exactly a common language logic in Bavaria. Repeated negation is popular even in local literature. “I asked him if he didn’t want any cigars, but he said no, because he didn’t smoke such strong cigars,” one can read in Ludwig Thoma ‘s rascal stories.
Viewed in this way, you can’t really make up for the fact that the Regional Institute for Market Research has just found out that 61 percent of Bavarians speak dialect on a daily basis. And this despite the fact that Bavarian has been on the list of threatened languages for twelve years. Now the study says that Lower Bavaria (87 percent) and Upper Palatinate (84 percent) have a particularly large number of dialect speakers. Presumably, in times of spying on the Internet, they consider it very practical to master a secret language: “When the Bleamestock ned giaßd, na dadirrdada” (If you don’t water the flower stick, it will wither). The Upper Palatinate expresses the constraints of existence like this: “Da bou mou dou, wos da bou dou mou!”
The world view in these regions has always been very tight: “Yes, my!”, “As far as I’m concerned!”, “Can’t do anything!” A proximity to other world languages can be seen. An Indian pastor who practices in Lower Bavaria said that a sinner who had spread untruths had confessed the outrage to him in Chinese: “I hon glong!” The dialect expert Sepp Obermeier once told of a boy who was allowed to take part in the nativity scene. He was reminded that he must speak according to the Scriptures. Because he played the donkey, the text book provided him with a loud “iaah, iaah, iaah”. The boy thought about it and shouted happily: “Me too, me too, me too!”