section_path: Demographics/Language
section_name: Language
paragraph_text: Language
  
  The official language of Austria has been German since 1920, based on article 8 of its constitution the same year. Austrian German or Austrian (a variety of Standard High German) is usually written in Austria and Italian South Tyrol, it has been standardized in Austria since the Ministry of Education, Science and Research published the Österreichisches Wörterbuch in 1951, though used primarily just in education, publications, announcements, and websites. However, the de facto common spoken languages of Austria are not Austrian German taught in schools but Bavarian and Alemannic dialects: Two Upper German local languages or collection of dialects with varying degrees of difficulty being understood by each other as well as by speakers of non-Austrian German dialects. Taken as a collective whole, German languages or dialects are thus spoken natively by 88.6% of the population, which includes the 2.5% German-born citizens who reside in Austria, followed by Turkish (2.28%), Serbian (2.21%), Croatian (1.63%), English (0.73%), Hungarian (0.51%), Bosnian (0.43%), Polish (0.35%), Albanian (0.35%), Slovenian (0.31%), Czech (0.22%), Arabic (0.22%), and Romanian (0.21%).
  
  The Austrian federal state of Carinthia is home to a significant indigenous Slovene-speaking minority while in the easternmost federal state, Burgenland (formerly part of the Hungarian portion of Austria-Hungary), there are significant Hungarian - and Croatian -speaking minorities. Burgenland Croatian, Hungarian, and Slovene are also recognized as official languages beside German in parts of Carinthia and Burgenland.
  
  According to census information published by Statistik Austria for 2001 there were a total of 710,926 foreign nationals living in Austria. Of these, the largest by far are 283,334 foreign nationals from the former Yugoslavia (of whom 135,336 speak Serbian; 105,487 Croatian; 31,591 Bosnian–i.e. 272,414 Austrian resident native speakers in total, plus 6,902 Slovenian and 4,018 Macedonian speakers).