Originally Posted by magexpect
Sorry Terenz, I don't know how you look like...
I understood what you said about rural areas and English, FlyingHawaiian was asking about Salzburg and Vienna... He will have no problems with English there, for sure.
No worries. It's just that I know FlyinHawaiian is the same ethnicity as me so at least some caution is warranted. FWIW, my GF's nephew recently spent nearly 2 weeks in Austria visiting his extended family. He looks like your typical germanic Austrian (tall, blonde, fair) so has no problems (and as he's with family...). While a good many of his numerous 2nd cousins (toddlers to 30+) do speak/understand at least some English, it's very marginal even for those who went to school in Vienna let alone the ones from the rural Salzkammergut (the older generations, as I earlier said, speak very little if any). Good thing the nephew has been learning German from his grandmother.
The only places I have been in Austria where not speaking any German would be a problem are small villages, where although they understand my Berlin-accented German, I often have no idea what they are saying to me.
As you discovered, not only is the German spoken accented (even in Vienna) but dialects are also spoken everywhere and are very localised to boot (different valleys have different dialects). One of my GF's lifelong Viennese cousins can't understand the rural dialect spoken in her husband's home province of Carinthia. FWIW, the dialect spoken in the westernmost province of Austria is an Allemanic dialect akin to the "German" spoken in Switzerland and is not comprehensible to many other Austrians.