Southern Bavarian

The Southern Bavarians speak the southernmost Upper German Bavarian dialects, in the Alpine valleys of Tyrol and Styria. Their highlands emerged from the Bavarian stem duchy as frontier estates: the counts of Tyrol, documented from about 1140, held an immediate county across the Brenner, while Styria was raised to a duchy by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1180.

Both passed to the Habsburgs: Styria after Rudolph I's victory at the Marchfeld in 1278, and Tyrol when the childless Margaret Maultasch bequeathed it to the Austrian dukes in 1363. Duke Frederick IV made Innsbruck his capital in 1420; the Graz line of Inner Austria led the Counter-Reformation of the 1580s, expelling the astronomer Johannes Kepler and other Protestants in 1600. Ottoman raids after 1526 repeatedly depopulated the Styrian countryside.

In the Napoleonic wars Tyrol was ceded to Bavaria in 1805, rose under Andreas Hofer in 1809, and was returned to Austria by the Congress of Vienna in 1814. The Southern Bavarian vernacular remained the language of valley and mine town throughout.