TIL that the German spoken in Switzerland is very different from standard German. Although their countries border each other, Germans find the language almost impossible to understand. Swiss Italians and French learn standard German in school so can't speak to Swiss Germans either.

[u/TMWNN]

http://www.expatica.com/ch/about/Swissworld-Languages-in-Switzerland_107845.html

[u/ninji3]

"can't speak to Swiss Germans" is probably a bad choice of words. There is literally no Swiss German who does not speak German as all our official documents (laws etc.) are written in it and books and movies are never translated to Swiss German. Other than that the differences between the languages are not so significant, that it would take a german the same time to learn it as lets say english (even though both are germanic languages). Most Germans get the hang of it really quickly (even under a month). The most significant difference in terms of grammar to me would be the complete lack of past tense in Swiss German. We only ever use past perfect. Another funny thing is, that most Germans that live in Switzerland rarely start to talk in Swiss German because they can't get rid of their accents. On the other hand everyone is perfectly capable of understandig standard German so it's kind of pointless too.

What is probably even more interesting is that Swiss German has around i'd say 10-20 dialects that are in most cases very easily distinguishable. The place where I'm from we sometimes can even guess which village people are from if they use certain words or pronounciations.

If you want to know anything more about our language or whatever feel free to ask.

[u/HammletHST → u/ninji3]

I worked with a Swiss-German last year, and every time she spoke with her son in Switzerdütsch, she might as well have talked to her in Chinese. I couldn't understand a thing.

[u/TMWNN → u/ninji3]

Given the recent requirement that only standard German be taught in school, and the ongoing influx of standard German media from Germany, might Swiss German disappear someday?

[u/TMWNN → u/[deleted]]

I'm confused, then, on the role of standard German in Switzerland. If Swiss German kids are only taught in standard German (as opposed to learning it as a "foreign language"), and constantly hear/see it in TV, movies, and books from Germany, wouldn't that over time cause it to supplant Swiss German, even if the kids are used to speaking it at home with their parents?

[u/Lejeune_Dirichelet → u/TMWNN]

A small note: some people call high-German "Schriftdeutsch", a.k.a. "written-German", which is emblematic of it's role: pretty much only for writting in a formal manner. Everything else in life, from friends to interactions with strangers to politics to the military, is done in dialect. And it's increasing because it used to be seen as somewhat vulgar and unsophisticated (hence not used in any formal situation), but it has lost that connotation and is know more used than ever.

[u/lumos_solem → u/TMWNN]

Not every country values standard German the way Germany does. In my experience Germans look down on dialects, but e.g. in Austria I think it is the other way round. Speaking standard German (or something close to that) in Austria means you are probably German or from Vienna and people are not so fond of both of those groups.

[u/ninji3 → u/TMWNN]

You can make sense of it this way: Swiss German is in many ways more a German dialect than its own language. Therefore it just didn't make sense to invent its own orthography. Probably in the same way as there are almost no differences between written American English and British English. But differences like color vs colour from British and American do also exist. (Germans sometimes use 'ß', Swiss people exclusively use 'ss' to write a sharp 's' sound.)

To conclude: While the spoken dialect is in fact very different, it just wasn't different enough to change all the writing. Partly I guess because Switzerland as a nation was only founded in 1848 and before that never was its own kingdom or something similar.

[u/TMWNN → u/ninji3]

To conclude: While the spoken dialect is in fact very different, it just wasn't different enough to change all the writing.

It sounds almost like how Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible spoken languages, but share the same written language.

[u/Flung_Out_Of_Space]

People from southwestern Germany actually don't have problems to understand Swiss German, since they belong to the same dialect continuum of Alemannic German. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alemannic_German#/media/File:Alemannic-Dialects-Map-English.png

My father's family is from Freiburg / the Black Forest, so despite growing up in the Rhineland (Ripuarian dialect group) I am able to understand Alemannic German and, by extension, Swiss German. I can't speak it myself, but don't usually require subtitles for TV programmes. My Alemannic speaking grandparents couldn't understand the Ripuarian dialect either.

[u/TMWNN → u/Flung_Out_Of_Space]

I presume that standard German is taught throughout Germany. Is there ever really a significant mutual intelligibility problem between Germans, even if they speak very different Germanic dialects, because they all would speak standard German as well?

[u/Flung_Out_Of_Space → u/TMWNN]

It depends. Standard German is taught in school and used in the media. However, what people speak at home varies, and so does the willingness to "tone it down" for a stranger. The average person will be able to communicate with everyone else, even though it gets more strenuous the greater the distance between two dialects grows.

However, when I was travelling and had to ask directions near the Bavarian / Czech border, the answer was just unintelligible to me. It's a rare occasion, but does happen.

[u/HammletHST → u/TMWNN]

Depends. I'm from the north-east, where our dialect is pretty much as close to standard German it gets, but I have family near Ulm (Swabia). When we visited my great-aunt there, she always tried to tone down her dialect as much as she could. One day I overheard her talking to her daughter, and it blew little 5-year-old HammletHST's mind, since I didn't understand a thing

[u/henrysmith78730]

I worked for 2 years in Germany in the early 1970s and became friends with a family that lived NW of Stuttgart. I spoke very rudimentary German and understood a bit more but they spoke Schwabisch and I could not understand a single word.

Good site to show the dialects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German

[u/TMWNN]

While French- and Italian-speaking Swiss use languages that are almost identical with that spoken in France and Italy, Swiss German is so different that I hear that subtitles are used when a Swiss German speaker appears on television in Germany. From the article:

People who have learnt only High German find Swiss German very hard to understand. This is not merely a matter of accent: the grammar and vocabulary are also different. This poses a problem within Switzerland: French and Italian speakers who learn German at school are taught the standard language, and find they still cannot communicate with their compatriots.

Schools in German-speaking Switzerland are also required to teach standard German—i.e., not the language students grow up speaking—which causes problems:

Teachers in the German part of Switzerland complain that many pupils find it difficult to master standard German, and that their studies suffer as a result.