Austria Culture & Language

Austrian culture divides fairly cleanly between an imperial urban inheritance and a rural alpine one, and the two have less to do with each other than outsiders assume.

Music

Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, Johann Strauss and the Second Viennese School all worked here, and Beethoven spent his career in Vienna. The Philharmonic’s New Year concert is broadcast worldwide, and the city still supports an unusual number of full-time orchestras and opera houses for its size.

Vienna 1900

Within one generation and a few square kilometres: Freud and psychoanalysis, Klimt and Schiele and the Secession, Schönberg and atonality, Loos and modernist architecture, Wittgenstein and Zweig. The city has been living with the comparison ever since.

The coffee house and the pastry

Both are institutions. Sachertorte, Apfelstrudel, Kaiserschmarrn, and coffee ordered by name — Melange, Einspänner, Verlängerter — with a glass of water alongside that is refilled without asking.

Baroque

The Counter-Reformation rebuilt Austria in Baroque, and the abbeys at Melk and St Florian, the churches of Salzburg and the palaces of Vienna are the result. It is the visual language of the whole country outside the mountains.

The Lipizzaners and the riding school

The Spanish Riding School in Vienna has trained Lipizzaner stallions in classical dressage continuously since the sixteenth century, in a Baroque hall built for the purpose, and the practice is UNESCO-listed. The horses come from a stud founded in 1580 and are born dark, whitening over several years.

The alpine west

Tyrol and Vorarlberg have their own dress, dialect, music and architecture, and a tradition of carnival masks and midwinter processions that is genuinely old rather than revived. Schuhplattler dancing, brass bands and the Alpabtrieb cattle descent in autumn belong to this half of the country.

German is the official language, and what is spoken is Austrian German — a distinct standard with its own vocabulary, not simply an accent. Many everyday words differ from the German used in Germany: Erdapfel rather than Kartoffel for potato, Paradeiser for tomato in the east, Sackerl for a bag.

Beneath the standard sit Bavarian-family dialects that vary sharply by region; Vorarlberg’s is Alemannic and closer to Swiss German than to Viennese.

English is widely spoken in cities, tourism and among younger people, less so in rural areas and among older people.

The greeting matters: Grüß Gott is standard in most of the country, Servus is informal, and Grüß dich sits between. Danke, bitte and Auf Wiedersehen on leaving a shop are expected rather than optional.