Austrian Dialect
The Austrian Dialect of German is a distinctive form of that language spoken in Austria, with influences from Italian and also the neighbouring Slavic languages as well as the southern German (Bavarian) dialects.
Austrian Dialect differs sufficiently from Standard German to be intelligible only to southern Germans without any degree of difficulty. Natives of northern regions - around Berlin, for example, find it very difficult to understand. Austrians claim, jokingly, that their dialect is unintelligible to the Swiss because "nobody can understand the Swiss", but in reality there are some similarities between the two languages.
The most striking difference between Austrian Dialect and Standard German is the former's relative informality. While the "du" and "Sie/sie" forms of address still exist, there are fewer verb declensions and forms of address particular to either the informal or the formal.
Another important difference is the use of words from other languages, most notably the Italian "ciao" as both a greeting and a farewell.
Finally, words such as "servus," meaning either "hello" or "goodbye", "Tschick" ("cigarette") and "Topfen" (a type of ricotta-like cheese known as "Quark" in Germany) are also used in Austrian Dialect where they do not exist in Standard German. There are also instances of some words meaning different things in Austrian, for example, the word Stuhl in German means "chair"; in Austrian, it generally refers to an armchair, which in Germany would be called a Sessel. The word Sessel is similarly switched in Austrian.
The Austrian television show "Kommissar Rex" demonstrates Austrian Dialect very well throughout its episodes - as well as various other German dialects.
