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Because Austria – specifically eastern Austria (Vienna, Burgenland) and south-eastern Austria (Carinthia, Styria) – is where the Germanic world meets the Slavic world, and it’s been that way for the best part of a millennium. During the imperial days (so, until November 1918), Vienna as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a magnet for immigration from all over the Empire, but particularly from nearby Bohemia and Moravia, just to the North.
In the Burgenland, there exists to this day a small but established population of Croats (whose language forms a distinct branch of Croatian, having been ‘cut off’ from the main body of the language for centuries).
In Carinthia and Styria, there is a minority Slovene-speaking population (historically referred-to as Wends), with some villages bilingual in German and Slovene along the border with Slovenia.
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