The “SonntagsZeitung” reports on a school in Aargau that has introduced compulsory German in the playground. Reason: high proportion of migrant children. This means a ban on the use of any language other than standard German or Swiss German, also known as a dialect.
But what is Swiss German? Definitely not a dialect. Rather, it is a collective term for the Old German languages and language forms that have survived in the mountainous, rugged Confederacy over the centuries – up to our time Globalesisch.
Zurich German, Urian German and Welsh German are languages of great expressiveness, Bernese German is even a language with its own literature. Jeremiah Gottelf, a native of Emmental and known as a German classic, would be unthinkable without the Bernese German with which he spices up his works. The playful and sensual Emmentaler Friedrich Dürrenmatt also has its roots in Bern with its world theatre. Zurich German, on the other hand, characterizes the world-read linguistic style of the novelist Max Frisch with Zwinglian rigor.
The Swiss-German languages are the native languages of the German-speaking Swiss, intimate languages, languages of the soul, mother tongues – and thus language houses. Today they are often devalued as “dialects” that should give way to immigrant slang, whether it’s gibberish from North Africa and Southeast Europe or English from the uptowns of wealthy emigrants.
On the other hand, German, called High German, is one of the national languages of Switzerland.
The first linguistic feeling of Swiss children arises in the security of their mother tongue – their mother tongue. A peculiar bilingualism of the German-speaking Swiss develops with school lessons: silent internal translation from their regionally narrowly defined mother tongue into a national language, for example from Upper Valais German into Standard German.
The effort of translation in the head may disappear through habit and practice into the unconscious, but the process remains formative. Even for poets: they often write in more conscientious, more elegant German than their German counterparts. For example, Jörg Steiner from Biel, or Peter Bixel from Solothurn, or Adolf Muschg from Zurich, or Thomas Hürlimann from Zug, or even Dürrenmatt and Frisch: the subtlest formulation of sentences, constant linguistic awareness, i.e. constant tension – the poetic distance to the written word .
The Swiss-German languages are Switzerland, its innermost and innermost culture, its essence.
But there is another side: migrants. They must and want to integrate. Most intensively this happens through the language. Swiss-German idioms are an offer to immerse yourself in Switzerland, to make Switzerland your own, up to assimilation. The necessary curiosity for languages children bring with them from birth. Young migrants like to show at home what they are Swiss, showing off Swiss-German, to the misunderstanding of their foreign-speaking parents.
Integration is done through the language. A prerequisite for this is a sufficiently large majority of Swiss children in schools – the earliest example of integration into a majority society.
Where the numbers are reversed, young migrants fail to integrate and problematic forms of counter-integration of Swiss children by young foreigners arise.
This includes displaying masculinity with a knife in the schoolyard, adopting anti-Semitic vulgarities, and infringing on masculine behavior towards girls. In immigrant-dominated schools, a patriarchal culture of violence is an explosive problem and fuels xenophobia.
Schools where local youth feel like a minority also pose problems for the future of these children: in classes where there are too many children who do not speak the local language, the subject can only be taught at a slower pace, which is disadvantageous for children at the beginning of their lives. Heinz-Peter Meidinger, president of the Association of German Teachers, puts it bluntly: “The main reason for the drop in performance in primary schools is the proportion of students with a migration background, which has increased by more than 50 percent over the past ten years. years.”
So wealthy families send their offspring to elite private schools, families that often preach a vibrant culture of foreign hospitality.
German-Swiss mother tongues are indispensable as playground languages. The German national language is indispensable as the language of instruction.
It is important to preserve the cultural identity of Switzerland, especially in its complex and complex, yet extraordinarily creative German-Swiss linguistic diversity.