We enjoyed our second-last meeting on the fifth of May in the Ristorante Rosso near Koskipuisto. It was very nice there and I have tried to teach Robbe a bit about Swiss-German. I have told the most important thing first: There is no official language “Swiss-German” in Switzerland. At school all the people from the German-speaking-part have to learn and speak a language called “Hochdeutsch” which means directly translated High-German. It is the standard German that students also learn in Germany and Austria. There are only small differences between the High-German of Switzerland and Germany. One thing is the sharp S which occurs in Germany and is difficult to learn. It is written like that “ß” and occurs in many words instead of double S like “Straße” which means street. In Switzerland we do not use this letter and just write double S, like “Strasse”.
However, people from Switzerland are proud of their nation and language and say that Swiss-German is an own language and not just a dialect of German. We speak as much as we can in Swiss-German and try to avoid German. Only in letters and emails German is common. In the new applications like WhatsApp, all the young people and also many older use Swiss-German to communicate.
Furthermore, Swiss-German consists of many dialects. Some dialects are so different that even people from Switzerland cannot understand the meaning of a speech, just some single words.
Another fact is that in Swiss-German some words from France are used like “Lavabo” which means in German “Waschbecken” or sink in English. We also use some English words like “Goal” in football. Then, we also have our own words, which you can find nowhere else like “Hegel” which means “Taschenmesser” in German or penknife in English.
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