The Austrian Word of the Year 2018

Published on 08 December 2018

Like many other language communities, Austrian German has a team of scientists and publishers based in Graz who organize a public voting procedure for the “Word of the Year” whose results have recently been published. And sure enough, they are different from the favorites in German German or Swiss German, providing evidence for the linguistic diversity in our crossroads societies.

If you are not fluent in German (yet), we invite you to watch the video tutorial by the actress Ewa Placzynska explaining in English the infinite uses of “Oida” which won first place as the Austrian Youth Word 2018. This shows how a single lexical item can be enriched by prosody, facial expressions, and gestures to help you survive as a non-native speaker in Austria.