Carolin speaking Bavarian

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CC BY-SA 4.0

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This video was recorded in Germany by native Bavarian speaker Carolin Wunderlich. Bavarian was spoken by 7,830,000 in Austria and roughly 14,089,000 speakers internationally as of 2012. Bavarian is a West Germanic language in the Upper German group within the Indo-European language family. Its speakers reside primarily in Bavaria, much of Austria, South Tyrol in Italy, and Samnaun in Switzerland. Prior to speakers being relocated in the wake of World War II, Bavarian had active communities in the southern Czech Republic and parts of Hungary. Within Bavarian exists a variety of dialects that are more or less mutually intelligible. The populations living in and around the Duchy of Bavaria constituted the first Bavarians in the early medieval period, then belonging to the southeastern region of the Kingdom of Germany. Bavarians are generally able to read and write in Standard German (Hochdeutsch), but some present difficulty when speaking it -- for this reason they sometimes refer to it as "Schriftdeutsch" or "written German," owing to its prevalence in mass media.

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