Baiuvarii

The Baiuvarii, Baiovari or early Bavarians were a Germanic people who first appeared in the 6th century. They originally lived in what had been the Roman province Raetia, south of the Danube, in what is now southern Bavaria. From there, their territory expanded. Their culture, language and political institutions are the predecessors of those of the medieval Duchy of Bavaria. Their polity developed under the influence of the Frankish empire, and eventually became a stem duchy.

The Baiuvarii are first mentioned in contemporary records starting in the 6th century, soon after the end of the Western Roman Empire, which had included Raetia and many of the surrounding countries.

Among the Baiuvarii the Bavarian language developed, which is a West Germanic language closely related to Standard German. Modern versions are still spoken not only by modern-day Bavarians, but also by Austrians and South Tyroleans.

Early evidence of the language of the Baiuvarii is limited to personal names and a few Runic inscriptions. However, by the 8th century AD, the Austro-Bavarian language was already well-established.

The language of the Baiuvarii was West Germanic, like its descendants medieval Old High German, and the modern Bavarian language. It was so similar to the contemporary languages of the neighbouring Alamanni, Thuringi, and Langobards, that it is difficult to tell them apart. This southern group of languages or dialects which are precursors to Old High German are sometimes distinguished from closely related northern dialects, such as those spoken by the Franks, as "Elbe Germanic". However, the model used to define this term is now considered obsolete, in favour of the idea that all or most of continental West Germanic languages were in one dialect continuum after the Migration period.

A peculiarity of Bavarian compared to its neighbours is that it appears to have loaned words from East Germanic languages, such as Gothic.

The name of the Baiuvarii had many written variants, but many of these differences can be explained in terms of the spelling conventions of the time. For example, the use of the letters "b", "v", "u", "uu" and "o" was common when representing the same w-like sound in words from Germanic languages. Similarly, versions with a letter "g" such as Bogari, Baguvarii, are using that letter to represent a palatal glide, or y-like sound. Versions with an initial p such as Pagoarii, Paioarii, Peigiro reflect the normal Upper German version of the High German consonant shift, which still distinguishes southern dialects of German today, and so this represents a real variation in pronunciations.

Modern scholars reconstruct the original Germanic pronunciation before the first written forms as *Baiwari, and singular *Bai(a)warjōz. According to Rübekiel, the standard modern terms such as German Baj-u-waren and English Bai-u-varii are based on a misunderstanding of early medieval spellings such as Baiuuari, where "uu" really represented a single w-like consonant, and not an "uw" syllable.