Austria well as those with significant German speaking minorities: Italy, Belgium and Denmark. Many local dialects are spoken in Austria, and though their base is Austrian German, their corresponding speakers have certain degrees of difficulty when trying to understand each other. The common spoken language of Austria is not the Standard German taught in schools, however, but the Austro-Bavarian language: a group of Upper German dialects not particularly intelligible with Standard German. German languages or dialects are thus spoken natively by 88.6% of the population, which includes the 2.5% German citizens who reside in Austria, followed by Turkish (2.28%), Serbian (2.21%),
Official language of privately owned TV-channels must be translated into Russian (a similar privilege is granted to Arabic), warnings must be translated to several languages, signs are mostly trilingual (Hebrew, Arabic and English), and the government supports Yiddish and Ladino culture (alongside Hebrew culture and Arabic culture). The Constitution of Latvia (or Satversme) designated Latvian as the state language. In 2012 there was initiative to hold a referendum on constitutional amendments, elevating Russian as a state language. Kristīne Jarinovska in her analysis describes the proposal in the following way: It proposed several constitutional amendments for introducing Russian as Latvia's second official language—i.e.,