From SwissInfo

German newcomers struggle with Swiss German

Terence MacNamee
swissinfo.ch
Jul 7, 2010 - 15:51


One might think that Germans would have no language problem when they come to German-speaking Switzerland, but often they are stymied by the local dialect.

On the other hand, Germans who have been here for a while say dialect opens up the secret places of the Swiss heart.

Recently, there has been a wave of German immigration to Switzerland, mainly because of the EU-Swiss agreement allowing free movement of people to take up jobs.

One now meets Germans everywhere in the German part of Switzerland. They present a new cultural and linguistic challenge - mostly because they don’t speak Swiss German.

There are classes, books and CDs for learning Swiss German dialect, so if you really want to, there is no obstacle to it. However, research, journalistic investigations and everyday observation suggest that the majority of Germans who come here do not learn to speak Swiss German actively.

They are held back by inhibitions that do not bother other foreigners. They tend to say “when I try it, it sounds ridiculous!” or “it’s not my dialect!”. Meanwhile, Swiss commentators find it’s enough for the newcomers to understand Swiss German and not to speak it.

Elisabeth Maranta, a German who runs a bookshop in Chur specialising in languages, must be something of a record. She has lived here for 50 years and has never spoken Swiss German, although she certainly understands it by now.

She explains: “First I was in French-speaking Fribourg, then I married an Italian-speaking Swiss, and we have always spoken high (standard) German at home. Growing up with high German actually gave our children an educational advantage.”

“German Swiss are often at a disadvantage when they have to speak high German outside Switzerland, say on German TV. Even academics seem tongue-tied.


Sense of belonging

Why do they stick to Swiss German when it’s such a barrier?” Maranta wonders. She gives two reasons: “It is important for German Swiss to set themselves off from Germany and affirm their own identity. But also, dialect gives them a deep feeling of belonging.”

Harald Eichhorn is the rector of Chur Cathedral. A German from the Lake Constance area near the border with Switzerland, he came to this country as a young curate in 1985. He was a parish priest in Schwyz for many years before moving to Chur. Now a Swiss citizen, he is unusual in actually speaking Swiss German with gusto.

“There is no way you can avoid learning Swiss German as a pastor,” he says. “It is a matter of integration into local society. You need people to be able to communicate with you uninhibitedly.

“And a Swiss feels inhibited if he can’t talk Swiss German. He just can’t express his feelings or say what is in his heart, if he has to say it in high German. You can establish a relationship of trust with a Swiss if you can talk Swiss German yourself. So for me as a priest it was absolutely necessary.”

He explains: “it wasn’t all that difficult for me, because I come from a place where we spoke Alemannic dialect, which is like Swiss German. Other Germans who come here don’t learn to speak Swiss German because they can’t get their tongues around it. It’s not really arrogance on their part when they don’t want to speak it.”


Close to the heart

That idea of Swiss German as “language of the heart” is echoed by Klaus Scherer, director of the National Centre of Competence in Research in the Affective Sciences, an institute based at Geneva University which concerns itself with all aspects of emotion.

A German by birth himself, Scherer has had the opportunity to observe the emotional underpinnings of language in a career in Germany, the United States and latterly Switzerland.

“I think German Swiss always find it an emotional strain when they have to speak high German. As soon as a German joins the conversation, the emotional quality of the interaction changes: it is no longer spontaneous, it is slower and less expressive, the intonation gets flatter, even nonverbal behaviour is more inhibited.”

Swiss are able to express their emotions in Swiss German, not in high German - that is the key difference, he says.

“When one has learned a second language but doesn’t feel at ease speaking it, one cannot express one’s real feelings. Emotions are in themselves not verbal, but we do not know what emotions we have until we have words to express them. That channels the emotion. It also helps us to control our feelings. The expression of emotion is therefore an important function of language.”

So Swiss German survives and thrives because it fulfils important emotional needs. It is the language of the heart for German Swiss. Germans - and even other Swiss - need to learn to appreciate that fact.

From SwissInfo

A linguistic success story

swissinfo.ch
Jul 7, 2010 - 15:51


Swiss German is a classic case of what linguists call diglossia.

This term refers to situations where a dialect or spoken language is used for all purposes except very formal ones and for writing, for which a standard language is used. The standard language is not usually spoken, and the local dialect or language is not usually written.

In many European countries dialect is stigmatised as being for the lower socio-economic strata and the uneducated.

But in diglossia situations like German Switzerland, this is emphatically not the case. Everyone speaks dialect, from dukes to dustmen.

There is not one Swiss German dialect, but one for every city and region. The high German language is used only when writing or in very formal contexts like political speeches and broadcasts – and of course when talking to Germans and other foreigners.

High German is the language of the schoolroom, and many German Swiss profess to dislike speaking it or even hearing it, because it reminds them of school. They are used to reading it as a written language, of course.

Swiss German is a remarkable success story that continues to make progress at the expense of High German - notably in broadcast media and in mobile phone texting by young people.

There is a different interpretation of Swiss-German by the Swiss and by the Germans. Germans clearly consider Swiss-German a German dialect ... albeit one that is so strange that they don't understand it. We Swiss, on the other hand, consider Swiss-German our language, separate and different from German.

Indeed, Swiss-German is as far removed from German as Dutch. The linguistic distance between Swiss-German and German is as large as that between Spanish and Portuguese, and quite a bit larger than that between Norwegian and Swedish, for example.

Just a few days ago, I traveled by train from Zurich to Aachen. In the train, I shared a compartment with a (Northern) German lady who had spent her vacation in Davos. She complained to me that she cannot understand a word when Swiss are talking to each other. When they talk to her, they speak German, i.e., they are all perfectly well capable of speaking German, so why then "do they insist of speaking that barbaric dialect among each other"? "Why can't they speak 'normal' German like all other German-speakers?"

As a German tourist spending her vacation in Switzerland, we don't expect her to speak or even understand our language. We don't expect her to be able to communicate with us in Swiss-German any more than we would expect this of a Japanese or U.S. visitor. However, we mind her attitude, i.e., that she considers our language "barbaric," because it is "just a stupid dialect" that has no value; because German is "better" than Swiss-German.

What this lady expressed is a lack of respect for our culture, and this is the problem, not that she is not able to communicate with us in our language.

It is true that, if a German who lives in Switzerland for a long time, makes the effort to learn our language, the Swiss will generally appreciate the effort and be more friendly toward that German than to someone who has lived in Switzerland for many years and still expects everyone around to communicate with him or her in German. The reason is that, by making the effort to try to learn our language, that German expresses respect for and appreciation of our Swiss culture that is quite different from German culture.

One aspect that the above articles doesn't touch upon is history. It hasn't always been this way. In the early days of the 20th century, the Swiss considered their own way of speaking a "Mundart," an expression that you don't hear that much any longer here in Swiss-German speaking Switzerland. They also considered Swiss-German a German dialect, and there were articles published that mused for how much longer Swiss-German would survive. There were many Swiss families in those days who decided to speak German at home. Swiss-German was indeed considered of lower social standing than German also here in Switzerland.

This changed dramatically with the appearance of the 3rd Reich. The average Swiss did not want to have anything to do with fascism (there was a fascist movement also in Switzerland, but it was very small), and consequently German quickly disappeared from almost all Swiss households. Subsequently to WW-II, only non-natives would continue to speak German in their private homes, but none of the locals would. So, you might say that it was Hitler who saved the Swiss-German language from assimilation.

Today, that part of history doesn't play much of a role anymore in the relations of the Swiss and the Germans. Most people, except for the very old, were not even born at the time of WW-II yet, and for them, the events of those days have no political importance. They are only entries in the books of history. Today, the Swiss don't insist on speaking Swiss-German any longer to separate themselves from the Germans. We do it, because it is our language; because it represents an important facet of our culture.

So, why continue with the "diglossia"? Why not make an effort to standardize Swiss-German into a written language, the way the Dutch did? After all, also Dutch used to be a "German dialect" at some point in time.

The reason is that such a standardization is traumatic. It means that the individual regions of Switzerland would have to give up their own dialects in favor of a standardized Swiss language. This has happened many times in different places of the globe, and it can be done, but the Swiss-Germans have so far not opted for this solution.

We can observe the same problem right now with our Rhaeto-romanic speakers. There are five different main dialect of Rhaeto-romanic in two separate subgroups. Since there are so few native Rhaeto-romanic speakers, there is a real danger that the language will disappear altogether. The pressure, especially from Swiss-German, is too great. More and more villages convert to Swiss-German, i.e., they stop teaching Rhaeto-romanic in school, and one generation later, the language has disappeared from that village.

For this reason, an effort was launched in the second half of the 20th century to standardize Rhaeto-romanic. This effort is now in full swing. In the schools of that region of Switzerland, the children are taught the standard Rhaeto-romanic, and the grammar books and dictionaries of the former dialects are disappearing from the bookshelves of the local book stores. They are our of print.

And yet, the locals hate it. They feel deprived of their local culture, and they notice that their children are no longer capable of writing their local versions of Rhaeto-romanic correctly. Contrary to Swiss-German, which had never been used much in writing, the five dialects of Rhaeto-romanic were and still are written on a daily basis.

The effort will probably succeed in another generation or two, and this may indeed be the only way to ensure the survival of the language, but the transition is traumatic.

The Swiss-Germans so far didn't feel enough of a need or desire to go that route. There is now absolutely no danger for Swiss-German to die out. It is currently well established as a means for oral communication in all regions to which our language is native.

With the opening of borders within Europe, Swiss-German may once again come under pressure, and if and when this happens, there may be a need to go the route of the Rhaeto-romanic speakers, but for now, there is no majority to be found that would agree to it.

This is an interesting thread, Francois. It raises questions as to how language differentiation occurs in some situations but not in others that seem superficially similar.

Have the languages in Portugal and Brazil, in Spain and Mexico similarly differentiated?

American English and Australian English are different, but apparently much less so than the difference between language in Germany and in German-speaking Switzerland.

Can you give us a few examples of how the two dialects differ?

Clearly, the lady mentioned in post three had her cultural chauvinism stroked by the fact that Swiss-German has 'German' in the name. So, it's a variant of Her Language. What's wrong with these people, messing up Her Language?

Some of the same sort of impulse is at work, of course, in the irritation experienced by Swiss who don't like being told they are speaking Their Language wrong....

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Originally Posted by roadkill

This is an interesting thread, Francois. It raises questions as to how language differentiation occurs in some situations but not in others that seem superficially similar. Have the languages in Portugal and Brazil, in Spain and Mexico similarly differentiated? American English and Australian English are different, but apparently much less so than the difference between language in Germany and in German-speaking Switzerland. Can you give us a few examples of how the two dialects differ?

Time and isolation are the main factors. I recall reading in the run-up to the American-British war of 1812, the British would stop ships at sea and impress American sailors into their navy. They distingusihed Americans by their accent. So at that time, roughly 200 years from the first English-speaking settlement in America, the accents were distinct.

I note that English speakers have been in Australia for a little over 200 years now. Clearly the distinct accent took less time than that to develop....

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Originally Posted by roadkill

Have the languages in Portugal and Brazil, in Spain and Mexico similarly differentiated?

No, they haven't. You can immediately recognize a Mexican from his or her accent. They sing (just as the Swiss do ... in all four languages, by the way). There are also individual words that are used differently, but the language has remained essentially the same. Spain is the only Spanish-speaking country that uses the second person plural of the verbs. This form (vosotros ...) has disappeared everywhere in Latin-America. Also, there is an old polite form (vos ...) that has disappeared everywhere except in Argentina and Uruguay, which nowadays is used as the familiar form in those countries. Of all the variations of Spanish, the form spoken in Argentina is the one that differs most, because it contains lots of words borrowed from Italian (because many Italians emigrated to Argentina in the early years of the 20th century). Also, Argentina has a true dialect, called Lumfardo, which is only spoken by lower-class people in Buenos Aires. Lumfardo is even more similar to Italian. The name comes from Lombardic, an Italian dialect that used to be spoken widely in the North of Italy, and that has mostly died out ... except for Italian-speaking Switzerland, where one form of Lombardic (there called Ticines) is alive and well.

Also, a person from Brazil can be immediately recognized from his or her accent. Their version of Portuguese is much softer than the variety spoken in Portugal. There are also more Spanish words in the Brazilian variety than in the Portuguese variety. For example, a train is called tren in Brazil (just like in Spanish) but comboio in Portugal. Yet the grammars are essentially the same.

This is different with Swiss-German ... and in fact, it is not the Swiss-German that has changed. It is the German that has migrated away. The Swiss-German dialects are essentially Alemanic (Southern German) dialects of the 9th century. What happened is that Germany adopted as its official language the language of Luther, who lived much further North in Wittenberg, and the German dialects have over time become much more similar to the official German, i.e., there are still Alemanic dialects spoken in the South of Germany (especially in Baden-Würtemberg), and those people will understand the Swiss more or less, but their dialects have gotten assimilated over time to the official German.

Dialects similar to the ones spoken in Switzerland still exist in the Alsace region of France, in the Vorarlberg region of Austria, and in Liechtenstein. They speak essentially Swiss-German ... and the people of Vorarlberg are as little understood by the other Austrians as the Swiss are.

Yet, the difference is much deeper than just a different accent or a few words that are different. Our entire grammar is different. There is no imperfect tense in Swiss-German (we use the perfect tense instead), but Swiss-German has more subjunctive forms than German has (er meinte, ich habe gesagt, dass ... = er hät g'meint, ich hegi g'seit, dass ...). The construction of dependent sentences is very different (der Mann, mit dem ich sprach = de maa, wo-n ich mit em g'red han).

In fact, if you wish to learn Swiss-German, it isn't necessarily of great advantage if you already speak German.

Etymologically, Swiss-German is of course a German dialect ... as is Dutch. Yet, the issue is not when and how much two ways of speaking have moved apart, it is a question of identity of the speakers of those languages. The Germans identify with their language. They adopted at some point in time one official way of expressing things, and they called that language German. The Swiss do not identify themselves with German. For them, the German language is foreign. It is the first foreign language that they learn in school, but they learn it in the same way as they learn French or English. They need to learn the vocabulary and the grammar. It doesn't come naturally to them. They don't grow up with it. What comes naturally to a Swiss-German speaker is his or her dialect of Swiss-German, and all dialects of Swiss-German are sufficiently close to each other that there is no problem for people speaking any of these dialects to understand those who speak another dialect of Swiss-German. There is no need for translation between these dialects. They are all much closer to each other than any of them is to German.

I think, although I am not well informed on the subject, that there is some parallel with Arabic. There is a classical version of Arabic ("high Arabic" in German terms) that well educated Arabic speakers read and many can speak, whilst vernacular Arabic varies widely across the Muslim world from Algeria to Egypt to Iraq to India to Malaysia to Indonesia.

Centrality of the Koran in Islamic religion has kept "high Arabic" alive but I understand that there are significant common language linguistic differences across the regions.

Does anyone else know more about this?