I remember a foreign exchange student from Germany at my high school, and she herself said that the German spoken in Bayern, aka Bayerisch, was for all practical purposes a foreign language to /her/. And then there's this example of this other person who I've known, who went back and forth between the US and Germany as a kid, and for some reason learned Low Saxon, but *not* German, but didn't not really know of it as not being German per se, for quite a while, but kept on being heavily downgraded in German class in school here in the US, because he ended up writing this in Low Saxon rather than in standard Hochdeutsch very often.
Still Switzerland here but thinking about the French speaking and Italian speaking portions. They must have some regional differances in their speech that set them a bit apart from the French spoken in Frances,and the Italian one hears in Italy,no? Don`t recall ever hearing any mention a radically differant dialect of French or Italian while I was there.
As I recall most Schweizer that I knew were not overly enamoured with their cousins up north. "Mensch!" imitating a german. LOL
Bill H.,
There are minor differences between Swiss French and standard French, but not to the extent that one form is unintelligible from the other. This is due to the fact that the French Swiss have always maintained close linguistic and cultural ties with France throughout history. The same can be said about the Swiss Italians and Italy, although, unlike in France, regional dialects are still the primary spoken idioms in Italy. As a result, Swiss Italians speak the Lombardic dialect spoken in most of northern Italy. In Ticino, the Swiss speak several variants of Ticenese that are linguistically separate from both Lombard and standard Italian.
The Swiss Germans, on the other hand, don't share the same affinities with their German cousins to the north, which explains why they speak their varieties of Schwyzertütsch with pride.
For more info on Swiss languages, check out this site:
http://switzerland.isyours.com/e/index.html
Thanks for the link George,I`ll give it a look-see. I just dug out an old primer on Schwyzer-Duetsch by the Tacoma Swiss Society that I had used before going abroad to give me an idea of what I was in for. Actually the book is pretty well done,even though it only covers the dialect that is found in Canton Schwyz. Reading through it really brought back some memmories. If anybody is interested I can post some phrases/grammer in another thread. The book kind of does a phonetical spelling thing as if they did`nt...you would be reading Deutsch.
Absolutely interested. I mentioned this elsewhere, but it's relevant here. I had a year of German in college, and when I heard a welcoming speech at a special event in Switzerland, I didn't understand a thing. Then I understood an entire sentence, which was when the speaker said he was going to speak in hochdeutsch so that the foreigners could understand.
George : agree with you. French Swiss is very close to French French, with differences in accentuation, though. The French-speaking Swiss area may be called Romandy.