The different fate of the Swiss dialects

It is said that you can determine which region or even which village a Swiss German-speaking person comes from by simply counting to three. Many would probably take this bet. In contrast, a person’s social status cannot usually be determined by their Swiss German dialect. However, there is no rule without exception, as evidenced by certain “fancy” pronunciation forms in Bern or Basel.

Nevertheless, this ‘egalitarian’ quality of Swiss German means that dialect is spoken and heard in the office, in restaurants, in parliament and even in the theater. The standard language, on the other hand, is only used in special situations and is actually a foreign language for many German-speaking Swiss.

On the other side of the Röstigraben, things look a little different: the standard language dominates everything here, the local dialect – the so-called Patois – is still cultivated in individual clubs and is more folklore than a common language. In contrast to the German-speaking Swiss-speaking area, there is also a myth in the French-speaking area of ​​a ‘Bon français’ – a pure French – that is superior to the local dialects and accents. This leads to a standardization of the language and a distinction between uneducated and educated language.

In Italian-speaking Switzerland, the use of the standard language or dialect depends on the situation. The dialect is spoken with known people, in the family or in the village shop, but not at large gatherings or in shops in the city center. The three major language areas in Switzerland therefore differ considerably in the way they deal with dialects. These differences are explained by their history.

The Swiss-German dialects belong to a larger language area, the Alemannic, which mainly extends over Switzerland, southern Germany, Vorarlberg and parts of Alsace. From the 16th century onwards, the Southerners in this language area increasingly saw themselves as a unity. They wrote in their own written language, which they called the federal ‘Landspraach’. The Zurich Bible was also printed in this language.

Romanticism, which from around 1800 onwards, especially in Germany, cultivated the desire for the original and simple, had a special interest in folk customs and dialects. Swiss scholars began to collect dialect songs and poems that had been transmitted orally and sometimes to write them themselves. This led to an idealization of Swiss German.

We still feel the consequences of this today, because the dialect was not stigmatized in German-speaking Switzerland; in the 19th century, both rural and middle-class people spoke it. The German-speaking Swiss began to cultivate the dialect through dialect literature and language development and to give it national political significance.

During the formation of nation states, the dialect was eventually discovered as a means of defining itself as a nation while being able to distinguish itself from its German neighbors. The dialect was considered particularly ‘republican’ because all social classes spoke it. This language concept is formative for the German-speaking Swiss mentality, where clearly visible social progress is fundamentally suspect.

Even in western Switzerland, people still spoke local dialects 400 years ago. French-speaking Swiss patois largely belongs to the French-Provençal language area, which also includes the southeast of France and the Valle d’Aosta. The patois in the Jura is one of the northern French dialects, the “Lange d’oïl”.

How could these dialects suffer such a different fate than their counterparts on the other side of the Röstigraben? The replacement of the dialects with the standard French language was a very long process. The printing press and the Reformation, among other things, stimulated the spread of Northern French as a written language. Reformers translated religious scriptures into the Northern French standard language of the elites. It became a common language in the Protestant cities of Geneva and Neuchâtel, partly because Protestant printers from Northern France settled there and spread the language further.

Around 1790, scholars began to actively oppose the local dialects. Attempts were made from Paris to standardize the grammar and vocabulary of the French language and keep it ‘pure’. Dialects and linguistic peculiarities were combated. Since the 18th century, social elites have associated French with social and economic progress, while Patois as a traditional family language was no longer compatible with the image of a modern and industrialized society.

This went so far that speaking patois in the classroom was prohibited by law, for example in the canton of Vaud with the school law of 1806. According to the historical lexicon of Switzerland, the ancestral dialects are disappearing even in the most conservative Catholic and rural areas of Switzerland. In Valais, less than six percent speak the dialect, in Freiburg less than four percent and in the Jura just under three percent.

In southern Switzerland, the various local Italian dialects belong to the extended family of Lombard dialects. Because southern Switzerland is geographically fragmented by mountains and inaccessible valleys, no uniform dialect emerged, but the different dialects varied widely. Here the use of standard language was limited to writing and the church.

With migration and increasing contact between regions in the 19th century, Italian also spread Lingua Franca, that is, as a common colloquial language. At the same time, the use of dialect as a spoken language, for example in schools or in sermons, was increasingly suppressed or even banned.

Unlike patois, dialects were still maintained in southern Swiss families, so they did not disappear. In the 20th century, the dialect was discovered as a language with cultural roots and was increasingly used as a preferred language in private life. Today the dialects are still spoken by about a third of the population. It is viewed positively and seen as an identification factor.