Hans Bickel

Trying to learn German in Switzerland means having to learn everything twice. First I learn the actual German for something. Then I set about trying to work out why no one actually says that in Switzerland.

Horses and goats are not Pferde and Ziegen, they're Rossen and Geissen. (If you were making an effort to use STANDARD German, that is. In actual Swiss German you'd say Rosse and Gaisse.) One must remember to say schaffen instead of arbeiten and – when barbecuing – grillieren instead of grillen (something which the supermarket chain Coop forgot in a recent advertising campaign).

Unlike Germany, Switzerland has never made any efforts to rid its language of foreign words, and consequently there are huge numbers of borrowings here, especially from French. One eats Poulet, cycles a Velo and pumps up a Pneu. This results in some extraordinary Franco-German combos, like the Schokolade moelleux I had for lunch yesterday, or the ubiquitous merci vielmal, which is by far the commonest way of saying ‘thanks very much’ in Zurich.

So this little book of Helvetisms is quite a useful guide. The whole thing is basically just a compromise: the Swiss don't really like to speak Standard German, they like to speak Swiss German. These are just the words and phrase they can't stop using even when speaking what they call ‘Hochdeutsch’ (and this is a confusing moniker, because in linguistic terms Swiss German is just as ‘high’ as Standard German).

Switzerland is one of the few countries where ‘dialect’ (so-called) is steadily gaining ground over the written standard. Indeed writing is really the only place where Standard German is used, which is why some linguists have coined the phrase ‘medial diglossia’ to describe the situation here. I read something recently that talked about how political speeches given on National Day were routinely in Swiss Standard German in the 1960s and 1970s; now they are almost always in Schwyzertütsch. I can't help comparing all this to Scotland; I remember when the Scottish Parliament published a version of their website in Scots, and all my Scottish friends forwarded the link around like it was the biggest joke in the world, which indeed, in Scotland's sociolinguistic climate, it was.

Switzerland is in a much happier position. Nevertheless, as long as people here continue to switch to Swiss Standard German to write letters, books and newspapers, this dictionary will be a useful summary of the main differences between how they write here, and how they write over the border in ‘the Big Canton’.… (mehr)