German dialects?

Question

Is the swiss german language different from german of germany or from autrian germany? for intance in syntax, ortography, morphology?

Answer 1

German is what linguists call a "pluricentric language". As American English is different from British English and again different from Australian English (even if you only compare national standard varieties), so German has different standards in the Federal Republic of Germany, in Austria and in Switzerland. Apart from phonetic differences in the national standards (the "accent"), you have some different vocabulary (English "pub", for example, is "die Kneipe" in Germany, "das Beisel" in Austria, and "die Beiz" in Switzerland), some morphosyntactic differences (for example, different perfect tense auxiliaries for some verbs in Germany ("I sat" = "ich habe gesessen") as opposed to Austria and Switzerland ("I sat" = "ich bin gesessen"), and even some spelling differences. Germany-German "das Geschoss" ('projectile') is pronounced with a short "o" and consequently the following "s"-sound is spelled "ss". In Austrian Standard German, the word is pronounced with a long "o" and consequently spelled "Geschoß". This last letter "ß" is not used in Swiss German at all, so what is spelled "Straße" in both Germany and Austria is spelled "Strasse" in Switzerland (= English 'street').

Remember, we are talking of national standard varieties here, not of dialects (the Swiss dialects are so diverse that there is no such thing as "a" Swiss dialect).

Answer 2

The spoken Swiss German dialects are very different from standard German. They have different syntax, morphology and vocabulary.
Usually a German speaker does not even understand Swiss German.
Some linguists even see Swiss German as an independent language.

Swiss German is only an oral language. For written communication the Swiss use a variety of standard German which has only very minor modifications compared to the standard German used in Germany or Austria.

Answer 3

Swiss German actually only exists in spoken (oral) form, usually there are no printed documents at all in Swiss German.

Only if sending SMS, chatting in the internet or writing private e-mails there is a certain amount of (specially young) Swiss writing in Swiss German - but everyone in the own dialect version!!

(ALL official documents and serious websites are in the German standard language - with only a few differently used words in the three German-speaking counries)

Syntax and orthography are quite different. For instance, Swiss German does not contain a "simple past". And as every region and nearly every person pronounces a bit differently, there are no standard rules in Swiss German.

The Alemannic dialect (also not written) of Southern Germany and Western Austria is quite comparable to the Swiss German, here the syntax is the same, as far as I know.

Even Wikipedia exists in an Alemannic version (see link), but everybody writes the same word a bit differently, so it's not practical at all.

Greetings from Switzerland

Answer 4

Swiss German can be hard to understand. Austrian German would be clean and easy for the most part. German is a very mechanical language, thus the word orders would be about the same. If you ever listened to a Bavarian (Munich), they sound like they are talking with a mouth full of very hot mashed potatoes.