UBC July - Languages

Photo by Daniele La Rosa Messina on Pexels

Welcome back to July's UBC. This month I'm going to be talking about cultural differences between Switzerland and the USA.

Today's topic is Languages.

Living in a diverse, quadrilingual country, it's a slam dunk for me—not only do we have four national languages, but also countless dialects.

In the larger part of Switzerland  - about 63% - folks speak Swiss German. The Western part is the French speaking part, also called Romandie, about 23% of Swiss people speak French. Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux are cities where French is being spoken.

What about the Italian speaking? They are an even smaller minority (8%). They know it and have accepted it. In addition to their Italian mother-tongue, they have learnt to fluently speak German or French or both and never complain. Hey, they got all the pasta and vino to enjoy the good life! 

There's some 5.5% left, in case you were counting. They are split between Rhaeto-Romanic or "Rumantsch" (0.5%), which is our fourth, very neglected national language, and 5% "other languages" like ex-yugoslav languages, spanish and portuguese. 

Or English ;-)

The good news is tourists will get by just fine. Airport staff, hotel and restaurant employees, they'll all be happy to help you.

I feel, however, that marketing and sales people, even the media in Switzerland are overusing English. And you know I do I love English, but if they are using it in a wrong way, I cringe. Here are some examples:

People here go to public viewings all the time, especially in summer. It has nothing to do with someone's wake. It's simply a giant screen put up in a public space broadcasting the soccer game.

Let's stay for the moment with the public screening of the football match on the big screen. We like to call the device needed to project the image onto the screen a beamer, without realizing that for an American this is a BMW. 

Similar confusion: When we talk about a body bag we certainly don't want to refer to a pouch used to transport human remains. We simply mean a purse that is being worn "cross body". 

Handy is a popular word German speaking people use when talking about their mobile phone.

A German person may enter a clothing store and ask for a smoking. What he means is a tuxedo.

Once he wears his elegant outfit, he may want to use the opportunity and make sure there is a shooting, and what he means, is a photo shoot. 

Maye he will even attend a casting, without knowing that this may also mean the process of pouring liquid into a mold.  

When you as an English native speaker use the word old-timer you may refer to a senior citizen. What we mean is a vintage car. 

In the German speaking area it's also common to talk about wellness, and by doing so we basically mean "spa".

German speakers often use eventually (the mean "maybe"), actually (the mean "currently) or sensible (the mean sensitive) wrongly. 

During the pandemic the term to do home office was used a lot. What we in the German world mean by it is the situation of working from home. 

Back to Swiss German. It is not the high German that is spoken in Germany. It's Swiss German, and any German person who first starts working in Switzerland will not understand a word of it! To make matters worse, our dialects differ greatly, depending on whether we live in Basel, Bern, Zurich or St. Gallen. 

And don't get me started on the mountainous states like Grisons or Valais. 

So Swiss German is what our kids around here learn first. Since they grow up watching Swiss and German TV they understand high German from early on. Come Kindergarten and elementary school, the language taught in is high German. 

It's hard for us. We feel inferior, if not retarded, every time we have to express ourselves in cultivated high German. Ask any Swiss person. We'd rather speak English (or French, and that means something ;-)

Also, us Swiss have a bit of a rivalry going on with the Germans. 

They keep kicking our butts in soccer. We don't like it. And we resent their (overly) confident and demanding attitude. Here's an example. Early in the morning at the bakery:

Swiss person: "Grüezi, ich het gern es Brötli, bitte" Grüezi is our universal greeting word, like Hello. The rest is just your polite Swiss German way to ask for a bread roll, please.

German person: "Ich krieg 'n Brötchen." (I get a bread roll)

See the difference?

By they way, "Brötli" is a perfect example of Swiss German. We like to minimize the words for our stuff. A Brötli is a little Brot, the bread roll is the smaller version of a bread. Make sense? We use it for a lot of things. Except a mug is really, really large, we won't call it Tasse, but Tassli. A bag like a handbag would be a Tasche in German. Us Swiss prefer our Täschli, a small bag ;-) Not to confuse with the plastic bags that have been banned from supermarkets. They are called Säckli!

I can not do a post about Swiss German without sharing the word we may be most famous for:

A Chuchichäschtli is a kitchen cabinet. The only reason it's somewhat funny is because it contains so many ch sounds.

We also use a lot of French words in Swiss German that our German German colleagues have other expressions for:

• Wallet, Portemonnaie, Geldbeutel
• Truck or bus driver, Chauffeur, Lastkraftwagen-/Busfahrer
• Hairdresser, Coiffeur, Frisör
• Inspector, Conducteur, Schaffner
• Ticket, Billet, Fahrschein
• Sidewalk, Trottoir, Gehsteig
• Ice Cream, Glacé, Eis
• Chicken, Poulet, Hähnchen

Here's a fun videos Emily, a Canadian, experienced that the classroom high German is not taking her anywhere in her everyday life in Switzerland:

I just realize I've only been talking about languages in Switzerland. What about the US? Well, you know it, the majority speaks English.Some can differentiate between your and you're, and others can't. Don't worry, I'm not mocking you. There's plenty of German speakers who don't master comparable things. Back to "everybody speaks English in the US" - that's not entirely true, and it was quite shocking to me when I first traveled to Florida on my own. I arranged for an airport shuttle to take me to the hotel. 

Both the driver and the night porter only spoke Spanish. I would notice this again and again during my stay. We also have groups of people in Switzerland who can't or don't want to learn our language. In their professional and private lives, they move exclusively within their own ranks and seem to get by quite well. When I was at elementary school, it was common for young pupils to accompany their parents to talk to the teacher for the simple reason that they had to translate. I always wondered how accurately this was done, or whether they were embellishing their performance ;-)

Have you come into contact with foreign languages? When and how? Would you like to learn a new language?