The Amstetten dialect is a Central Bavarian dialect spoken in the Austrian town of Amstetten. It is a variant of the Mostviertel dialect.
Phonology
Vowels
The Amstetten dialect is very unusual among the world's language varieties in that it can be analyzed as featuring five phonemic vowel heights. Phonetically speaking, the vowels typically transcribed with in IPA constitute a series of open-mid vowels ( in narrow transcription), one-third the distance between the open central and the close in the formant vowel space. The vowels transcribed with and also differ from the cardinal vowels; the first series is close-mid ( in narrow transcription), two-thirds the distance between and . The remaining are near-close ( in narrow transcription), a series of very high vowels that approach in their articulation. Among those, the back is somewhat more central than the neighboring and .