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Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German) | ||
Tags: Swiss-German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| soclydeza85 Senior Member United States Joined 3912 days ago 357 posts - 502 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 1 of 9 15 April 2014 at 3:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm currently learning standard German but would eventually (once I'm proficient enough in SG) venture into learning a Swiss German dialect since I would like to do some traveling in Switzerland (as well as Germany). I know that most Swiss can understand Hochdeutsch anyway but it's still something I would like to do.
How would I go about this? There are VERY limited resources for this but I figure there has to be something somewhere for the vocab differences, common phrases and such. I know Pimsleur has Swiss German but there are only 9 lessons. Any ideas? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5135 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 2 of 9 15 April 2014 at 6:31am | IP Logged | ||
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There are quite a few German textbooks for learning Swiss-German. Get your German up to speed and work through one of those. The differences in terms of vocabulary and grammar (tenses, word order) are substantial. Many Germans need a few months until they understand Swiss German, it doesn't come for free. You probably should decide for a specific dialect since the differences between Swiss-German from Zurich, Bern or Wallis are huge. I struggle to understand Walliserdütsch at all, and even native Swiss may have problems with that variety of their language. Berndütsch and Züridütsch are also quite different but since everybody here has plenty of exposure to either variety nobody has problems understanding each other.
I suggest you check out a few Swiss-German podcasts to get an idea of how it sounds and how it differs from German, for instance the Regionaljournal Zürich-Schaffhausen if you want to go for Züridütsch. National podcasts feature a wide variety of dialects and may be more difficult to work with in the beginning. In the end, differences in pronunciation are mostly regular and can be figured out after some time. Differences in grammar are substantial so that you rarely can translate a German sentence word for word into Swiss-German (in particular tenses and modal verbs), but can of course be learned. The Swiss-German speaking Swiss, being used to talking to foreigners (30% of the population are foreign-born, more than double than in the US just for sake of comparison), would usually use Standard German with anyone not completely fluent in Swiss-German. It's a nuisance for learners, but they consider it as polite and more efficient; but you can always ask them to speak in Swiss-German to you and many will do. Good luck with Swiss-German, it's a beautiful and rich language (but what language isn't :)). Edited by Bakunin on 15 April 2014 at 6:32am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| soclydeza85 Senior Member United States Joined 3912 days ago 357 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 3 of 9 22 April 2014 at 3:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks! You gave me the idea of looking for Swiss-German textbooks written in German, and I found that they have a lot of materials on amazon.de. I guess it makes sense since there definitely aren't as many Americans/Britons looking to learn Swiss German as there are Germans.
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| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4627 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 4 of 9 25 April 2014 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Funny how Swiss German isn't recogised as a language in its own right. The Scandanavian languages are all mutually intelligible (to a certain extent) and they go under the banner of separate languages.
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| napoleon Tetraglot Senior Member India Joined 5021 days ago 543 posts - 874 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, Hindi, Urdu Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 9 25 April 2014 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah. Funny how this made me think of the quote:"A language is a dialect with an army and navy". Edited by napoleon on 25 April 2014 at 4:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4849 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 6 of 9 25 April 2014 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Standard Swiss-German is very close to High German. It would be ridiculous to call it a language in its own right, very much alike to calling Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Serbian different languages.
The Swiss dialects, however, are very different from Standard German, but so are the Austrian and South German dialects and Plattdeutsch. Are those languages? Normally, only Platt is recognized as a language (but not by everybody), while everything else is considered a dialect of German. This leads us to the eternal question where dialects end and languages begin. Another example is Luxembourgish, which originally was considered a Mosel-Fränkisch dialect of German and was only "declared" a language in the 80s. It's still mutually intelligible with German, although there are more French loanwords in Luxembourgish. Is it a language? The constitution of Luxembourg says so, but I'd doubt it. Last but not least, there even are some Germans who think Dutch is a German dialect, but that's another topic of its own. Edited by Josquin on 25 April 2014 at 4:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5674 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 9 25 April 2014 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Never say that to a Luxembourger ;-) I wouldn't say that it is mutually intelligible with German. In my experience, Germans from close to the Luxembourgish border understand it very well, as their own dialect is similar, but the farther away you get from the border, the less they understand. People from Berlin, Hamburg or Munich only understand some parts. I'd say that the difference between Luxembourgish and German can be compared to the difference between German and Dutch or Spanish and Portuguese. Back to the original topic: I lived in Zurich for 5 months and although I speak German at a near-native level, it took me a while to get used to Swiss German. After 5 months, I understood almost everything I heard though. There are definitely big regional differences. For me, the Basel dialect was the easiest to understand, Zurich and Graubünden were somewhere in the middle and the hardest I came across was Bern. Have fun with Swiss German and good luck with pronouncing my favorite word: Chuchichäschtli :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5135 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 8 of 9 25 April 2014 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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As far as I’m concerned, everybody just speaks a dialect of some language. To me, non-allemanic varieties of German (like Standard German) are as much a dialect of, say, Swiss-German, as the other way round. By the same token, both are languages in their own right. While people might be inclined to accept only the second proposition, i.e., that Swiss-German is a dialect of Standard German but not the other way round, I don’t buy into the notion of one speech variety being in some way superior (purer, more proper, more correct, more complex, more language-like and less dialect-like etc.) than some other speech variety. Those notions are invented by people who love to regulate other people’s speech or want to establish some kind of social, intellectual or political hierarchy. I haven’t seen any scientific linguistic evidence for a classification system which isn’t symmetric in the sense indicated above. If Luxembourgish is a dialect of German then German is a dialect of Luxembourgish. There may be all kinds of socio-cultural or political reasons why people take Standard German to be the true German and Swiss-German, Luxembourgish etc. a dialect or sub-standard (and I’ve even heard Swiss people themselves refer to Swiss-German as Buuredütsch [farmers' German]), but those reasons don’t hold water when examined through the lens of linguistics. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with adopting some kind of standard for communication within a speech community or nation, as well as a standard for written language. It’s convenient and greatly simplifies communication, but it doesn’t elevate the group of people who happen to have this very dialect as their native speech variety in any way above others. Symmetry, from a linguistic perspective, always holds.
After that little excursion which just had to get out, back to the original topic: I also find Swiss German from Bern more difficult than the other varieties mentioned by Iwwersetzerin, but of course I’m biased towards Züridütsch. I have seen separate courses for Bern-German and some other varieties in the bookshops, but I’m guessing that Züridütsch would be a good choice for non-residents since it is widely understood and spoken by a larger number of speakers than the other varieties. I would, however, recommend to pick one and stick with it. Mixing, say, Züridütsch and other dialects wouldn’t really work, they’re too different in terms of pronunciation and even grammar. As an example, the polite form in Bern is the second person plural (Ihr), whereas in Zürich it’s the third (Sie). Edited by Bakunin on 25 April 2014 at 7:58pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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