Language
Austrian German is used as official language.
The people are predominantly German-speaking with a unique (and easily recognizable) Southern Austro-Bavarian dialect typical of which is that all short German vowels before double consonants have been lengthened ("Carinthian Vowel Stretching").
A Slovene-speaking minority, known as the Carinthian Slovenes, is concentrated in the southern and south-eastern parts of the state. Its size cannot be determined precisely because the representatives of the ethnic group reject a count. Recommendations for a boycott of the 2001 census which asked for the language used in everyday communication make the figure obtained (12,554 people or 2.38% of a total population of 527,333 ) questionable.
Read more about this topic: Carinthia (state)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
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