#Swiss German speaker

[foggysilverfeathers]

Honestly adore how horrified people get when they learn about Swiss German

[appreciatingtokrev]

every day i think abt this tumblr post in which a us-american was incredibly fascinated by two girls they saw who were speaking english & japanese interchangably. because, like, i speak three languages interchangably on the daily. that’s normal to me. i’m not even fluent in french (been learning it at school for 10 years now tho lmao) but there’s enough french words & phrases i use on the daily. if i can’t remember a (swiss) german word/saying/etc while talking in german i just substitude with english because most people i talk to are fluent in both anyways. i greet my little brother in french and then go on to ask if he wants to go and by ramunae with me sometime, in swiss german, in the same breath, and i answer overmorrow when he asks me when because i think it’s a funkier word than übermorn.

i think about that post every day and i genuinly wonder how someone can grow up and never learn another language. how do you live without this? without the pressure to speak at least two of your country’s four official languages? without the pressure of learning the world’s language as a second/third? without ever seeing all the beauty in knowing more than one language, and being able to understand so much more of the world?

[damnpotatoe]

nothing against the dutch but why do you sound like you’re talking german in an english accent?? or like the sims language????

[loveyluca]

Marc is the new Barca captain oh I'm so happy for him!!

[cable-salamdr]

I also know schwiizerdütsch (kollegin hat mich grad dara errineret) und jetz füül ich mich echt bös darum schriib ich jetz aumal i dem :] Jemand wo Deutsch kann kann mal versuchen das zu übersetzen heheheh

Sometimes I remember I know German and I’m like. wow. Ich könnte einfach so jetzt zur anderen Sprache gehen und wahrscheinlich sehr viele Leute verwirren und frustrieren when sie versuchen irgendwas zu verstehen. Hah, no, anebo česki a potom vím je jenom také dva lidé mí bídou rozumět. But then I think about it for a moment and I’m like, nah

[biblicallyaccuratetrain]

i love being able to play "Alle meine Entchen" directly on tumblr via my bells. this feature should stay forever

[meichenxi]

UK accent bias, discrimination, minority languages and the question of the 'default, normal' english speaker

today I came across something overtly that is usually a covert problem, and I wanted to take a chance to talk about the questions it raises about what it means to be 'normal' and speak 'normal english' in an anglocentric, global world.

let's start at the beginning. I was aimlessly googling around and came across this article, discussing ergodic literature:

I hope that you will see what angered me right away, but if not:

brogue? inaccessible, insufferable brogue? that is so difficult to read you might want to relieve your frustrations by harming a housepet, or striking a loved one?

what????? the fuck??????

my dearly beloathed. this is not a made up sci-fi language. this was not written for your convenience.

this is the glaswegian dialect.

this is how it is written. scots, which is very similar to this, is a language whose speakers have been systematically taught to change and hide and modify their speech, to not speak it in the classroom, to conform. this is NOT comparable to any of the made-up dialects or ways of writing in cloud atlas or any other specularative fiction. the suggestion of ir is deeply insulting.

(the line between various 'dialects' and 'languages' I speak about here is by definition sometimes political, sometimes arbitrary, and often very thin. what goes for the glaswegian dialect here in terms of discrimination goes for scots in general - which is, in fact, even more 'inaccessible' than glaswegian because it has a greater quantity of non-english and therefore non-'familiar' words. speakers of different englishes will face more or less discrimination in different circumstances. caveat over.)

you can find it on twitter, in books, in poetry; and more than that, on the streets and in living rooms, in places that this kind of england-first discrimination hasn't totally eradicated.

an imporant note - this book in question is called Naw Much of a Talker, and it was written originally in Swiss-German and then translated into Glaswegian to preserve similar themes and questions of language and identity. rather than detracting from anything I'm saying, I think the fact this is a translated piece of fiction adds to it - it has literally been translated so it is more accessible, and the article writer did not even realise. it also highlights the fact as well that these are questions which exist across the globe, across multiple languages, of the constant tension everywhere between the 'correct' high language and the 'incorrect, backward' 'low' language or dialect. these are all interesting questions, and someone else can tackle them about german and swiss german -

but I am going to talk today about scots and english, because that is how the writer of this article engaged with this piece and that is the basis upon which they called it 'insufferable brogue', the prejudice they have revealed about scots is what I want to address.

so here, today, in this post: let's talk about it. what is 'normal' english, why is that a political question, and why should we care?

as we begin, so we're all on the same page, I would like to remind everyone that england is not the only country in the united kingdom, and that the native languages of the united kingdom do not only include english, but also:

scots

ulster scots (thank you @la-galaxie-langblr for the correction here!!)

scottish gaelic

welsh

british sign language

irish

anglo-romani

cornish

shelta

irish sign language

manx

northern ireland sign language

and others I have likely forgotten

there are also countless rich, beautiful dialects (the distinction between dialect and language is entirely political, so take this description with a pinch of salt if you're outside of these speaker communities), all with their own words and histories and all of them, yes all of them, are deserving of respect.

and there are hundreds and thousands of common immigrant languages, of languages from the empire, and of englishes across the globe that might sound 'funny' to you, but I want you to fucking think before you mock the man from the call centre: why does india speak english in the first place? before mocking him, think about that.

because it's political. it's ALL political. it's historical, and it's rooted in empire and colonialism and all you need to do is take one look at how we talk about Black language or languages of a colonised country to see that, AAVE or in the UK, multi-cultural london english, or further afield - the englishes of jamaica, kenya, india. all vestiges of empire, and all marked and prejudiced against as 'unintelligent' or lesser in some way.

and closer to home - the systematic eradication and 'englishification' of the celtic languages. how many people scottish gaelic now? cornish? manx? how many people speak welsh? and even within 'english' itself - how many people from a country or rural or very urban or immigrant or working class or queer background are discriminated against, because of their english? why do you think that is?

if you think that language isn't political, then you have likely never encountered discrimination based on how you, your friends, or your family speak.

you are speaking from a position of privilege.

'but it's not formal' 'but it's not fit for the classroom' 'but it sounds silly'. you sound silly, amy. I have a stereotypically 'posh' english accent, and I can tell you for a fact: when I go to scotland to visit my family, they think I sound silly too. but in the same way as 'reverse racism' isn't a fucking thing - the difference is that it's not systemic. when I wanted to learn gaelic, my grandmother - who speaks gaelic as her own native language - told me, no, you shouldn't do that. you're an english girl. why would you want to learn a backward language like gaelic?

discrimination against non-'english' englishes is pervasive, systematic and insidious.

it is not the same as being laughed at for being 'posh'. (there's more about class and in-group sociolinguistics here, but that's for another post)

and who told you this? where is this information from? why do you think an 'essex girl' accent sounds uneducated? why do you think a northern accent sound 'honest' and 'salt of the earth'? what relationship does that have with class? why does a standard southern british english sound educated and 'intelligent'? who is in charge? who speaks on your television? whose words and accents do you hear again and again, making your policies, shaping your future? who speaks over you?

think about that, please.

and before anyone says: this is so true except for X lol - I am talking about exactly that dialect. I am talking about that accent you are mocking. I am talking about brummie english, which you think sounds funny. I'm talking about old men in the west country who you think sound like pirates, arrrrr.

(actually, pirates sound like the west country. where do you the 'pirate accent' came from? devon was the heart of smuggling country in the uk.)

so. to this person who equated a book written in scots, a minority and marginalised language, to being 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue':

and also to anyone who is from the UK, anyone who is a native english speaker, and anyone abroad, but especially those of you who think your english is 'natural', who have never had to think about it, who have never had to code-switch, who have never had to change how they sound to fit in:

it might be difficult to read - for you. it might be strange and othering - to you.

but what is 'inaccessible' to you is the way that my family speaks - your english might be 'inaccessible' to them. so why does your 'inaccessible' seem to weigh more than theirs?

and why does it bother you, that you can't understand it easily in the first go? because you have to try? or because perhaps, just perhaps, dearly beloathed author of this article, after being catered to your entire life and shown your language on screen, constantly - you are finally confronted by something that isn't written for you.

and for the non-uk people reading this. I would like you to think very carefully about what a 'british accent' means to you.

there is no such thing. let me say it louder:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BRITISH ACCENT

there are a collection of accents and languages and dialects, each with different associations and stereotypes. the clever aristocrat, the honest farmer, the deceitful *racial slur*. there are accents, languages and dialects that you hear more than others because of political reasons, and there are accents, languages and dialects which are more common than others because of discrimination, violence and the path of history.

if you say 'british accent', we - in the UK - don't know exactly what you mean. much more than the US, because the english-speaking people have been here longer, we have incredibly different accents just fifty miles away from one another.

but we can guess. you probably don't mean my grandmother's second-language english - even though, by american conversations about race, she is the whitest person you could possibly find. you don't mean my brother, who sounds like a farmer.

you mean my accent. tom hiddleston's accent. benedict cumberbatch. dame judy dench. sir ian mckellen. and they are all wonderful people - but what sort of people are they, exactly? what sort of things do they have in common? why is it that you associate their way of speaking with all of the charming eloquence of 'dark academia' or high levels of education, and my family's english with being 'backward' or 'country bumpkins' or 'uneducated' or, more insidiously, 'salt-of-the-earth good honest folk'?

we are an old country with old prejudices and old classes and old oppression and old discrimination and old hate. my brother speaks with a 'farmer' west country accent; my aunt with a strong doric accent that most english people cannot understand; my father with a mockable birmingham accent; my grandmother with a gaelic accent, because despite the fact that she is from the UK, as scottish as you can get, english is not her first language.

these people exist. my grandmother is a real person, and she is not a dying relic of a forgotten time. her gaelic is not something to drool over in your outlander or braveheart or brave-fuelled scottish romanticism, the purity and goodness of the 'celt' - but there are fewer people like her now. and I would like to invite everyone to think about why that is the case.

if you don't know, you can educate yourself - look up the highland clearances, for a start, or look at the lives of anglo-romani speakers in the UK and the discrimination they face, or irish speakers in northern ireland. like many places, we are a country that has turned inward upon itself. there will always be an 'other'.

and then there's me. raised in southern england and well-educated and, however you want to call it, 'posh'. so why is it that it is my voice, and not theirs, which is considered typically british all over the world?

I think you can probably figure out that one by yourself.

when you talk about the 'british accent', this is doing one of two things. it's serving to perpetuate the myth that the only part of the UK is england, rather than four countries, and the harmful idea that it is only england in the UK that matters. (and only a certain type of people in england, at that.)

secondly, it serves to amalgamate all of the languages and accents and dialects - native or poor or immigrant or colonial - into one, erasing not only their history and importance, but even their very existence.

dearly beloathed person on the internet. I have no idea who you are. but the language scots exists. I'm sorry it's not convenient for you.

but before I go, I would like to take a moment to marvel. 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue'? what assumptions there are, behind your words!

is it 'insufferable' to want to write a story in the language you were raised in? is it 'inaccessible' to want to write a story in the shared language of your own community?

I don't think it is.

I think it takes a special sort of privilege and entitlement to assume that - the same one that assumes whiteness and Americanness and Englishness and able-bodiedness and cisness and maleness and straightness as being the 'standard' human experience, and every single other trait as being a deviance from that, an othering. that's the same entitlement that will describe Turning Red as a story about the chinese experience - but not talk about how Toy Story is a story about the white american middle class experience.

people do not exist for your ease of reading. they do not exist to be 'accessible'. and - what a strange thing, english reader, to assume all books are written for you, at all.

and despite the fact that the text that prompted this was written by one group of white people, translated into the language of another group, and critiqued by a third - this is a conversation about racism too, because it is the same sort of thinking and pervasive stereotyping which goes into how white people and spaces view Black language and language of people of colour around the world. it's about colonialism and it's about slavery and it's aboutsegregation and othering and the immigrant experience and it's about the history of britain - and my god, isn't that a violent one. it's inseparable from it. language is a tool to signify belonging, to shut people out and lock people in. it's a tool used to enforce that othering and discrimination and hate on a systemic level, because it says - I'm different from you. you're different from me. this post is focusing more on the native languages of the UK, but any question of 'correct language' must inevitably talk about racism too, because language is and has always been a signifier of group belonging, and a way to enforce power.

it is used to gatekeep, to enforce conformity, to control, to signify belonging to a particular group, to other. talking about language 'correctness' is NOT and never CAN be a neutral thing.

it reminds me of a quote, and I heard this second hand on twitter and for the life of me cannot remember who said it or exactly how it goes, but the gist of it was a queer writer addressing comments saying how 'universal' their book was, and saying - no, this is a queer book. if you want to find themes and moments in it that are applicable to your 'default' life, 'universals' of emotion and experience, go ahead. but I have had to translate things from the norm my entire life, to make them relatable for me. this time, you do the translation.

I do not speak or write scots or glaswegian, but I grew up reading it and listening to it (as well as doric and gaelic in smaller measures, which are still familiar to me but which I can understand less). for me, that passage is almost as easy to read as english - and the only reason it is slightly more difficult is because, predictably, I don't have a chance to practice reading scots very often at all. it isn't inaccessible to me.

(I was about to write: can you imagine looking at a book written in french, and scowling, saying, 'this is so insufferably foreign!' and then point out how ridiculous that would be. but then I realise - foreign film, cinema, lyrics increasingly in english, reluctance to read the subtitles, the footnotes, to look things up, to engage in any active way in any piece of media. this is an attitude which even in its most mockable, most caricature-like form, is extremely prevalent online. *deep sigh*)

because. what is 'inaccessible'? it means it is difficult for people who are 'normal'. and what is 'normal', exactly? why is a certain class of people the 'default'? could that be, perhaps, a question with very loaded and very extensive political, social and historical answers? who is making the judgement about what language is 'normal'? who gets to decide?

I'd also like to note that this applies to everyone. it doesn't matter if you are a member of an oppressed group, or five, or none, you can still engage in this kind of discrimination and stereotyping. my scottish family, who have themselves had to change the way they speak and many of them lost their gaelic because of it, routinely mock anglo-romani speakers in their local area. I have an indian friend, herself speaking english because of a history of violence and colonialism, who laughed for five minutes at the beginning of derry girls because the girls sounded so 'funny', and asked me: why did they choose to speak like that? my brother, who sounds very stereotypically rural and 'uneducated', laughs at the essex accent and says that he would never date a girl from essex. I had a classmate from wales who was passionate about welsh language rights and indigenous and minority language education but also made fun of the accent of her native-english speaking classmate from singapore. it goes on and on and on.

take the dialect/language question out of the topic, and I think this reveals a much broader problem with a lot of conversations about media, and the implicit assumptions of what being 'normal' [read: white, anglo-centric, american, male, straight, young, able-bodied, cis, etc] actually means:

if something is written about an experience I do not share, is it inaccessible? or is it just written for someone else?

so, please. next time you want to write a review about a dialect or language you don't speak, think a little before you open your mouth.

the rest of the world has to, every time.

[yuhi-san]

Hmm u vömer ar nid erscht vo dialekte ah, oder was dialekt isch odr was nid

,,,el problema es el monolinguismo,,,,,,

[mapsontheweb]

Linguistic map of Switzerland

Switzerland has 4 official languages; French, German, Italian, and Romansch, the dominant one being German. Many Swiss-German dialects are spoken across Switzerland, while the original Arpitan dialects of French have mostly died out. Romansch is a latin language, once more widespread, now only spoken by around 50,000 speakers across Switzerland.

by crocmapping

[zyonsay]

Yall are gonna be hearing some premium swiss german in my new joost series. Like full on bernese. Maybe some Zurich dialect too if i can find the masochism within to do that to myself.

Also another lil spoiler: i‘ll be projecting a lot onto the reader, specifically the problems i had growing up in a country where i was always seen as a foreigner even though i was born here.

(Rant/vent)

No matter how well i speak the language, no matter how much i try to integrate, i‘ll always be a foreigner. I‘ll always get stereotyped no matter if its the psychologists office, the classroom in my ‚inclusive and tight knit‘ school or even in church.

I‘ve had an identity crisis all my life. I learnt german as a first language because my mom didnt want me to struggle with language in school. But i never learnt the language the rest of my entire family speaks, Portuguese. I didnt fit in with the swiss kids, since they were all ‚real‘ swiss people and i didnt even have swiss citizenship. I didnt fit in with the portuguese kids because they all thought i was a ‚fake‘ portuguese because i dont speak the language.

My family hates me for not speaking their language and i hate myself for it too. Im grateful i never struggled with german, im actually very good at it, but i wish i wouldve been gifted the culture and tongue of my family.

I know it sounds simple ‚ohh, just learn it tf‘ but its more difficult than that. Firstly, im already learning 3 languages at school, plus dutch which i picked up because its quite easy to learn for swiss speakers.

I dont want to learn it like another duolingo course, but i want to speak it as my mothers tongue. I want the dialect the people from my hometown have, i want to know the slang that the boys playing football on the big sandy field next to my grandmas house use. I want to be fluent and find other portuguese people here in switzerland and be like „fala português??“

I want the community, i want the solidarity. For once i dont want to be the foreigner.

[sauntervaguelydown]

OKAY

In many fanfictions, it’s established that Dr. Doofenshmirtz can understand and communicate in ASL. Often times it’s mentioned he learned it when he was young. But as we all know, he was raised in Druselstein, which seems to be at least Germanic if not an actual German principality. (Born in 1970, during the Cold War.) So he definitely wouldn’t have learned American Sign Language there (unless it was an improbable coincidence), but he might have learned any one of three different major European sign languages:

Swiss-German (also used in Liechtenstein)

Official German (also in Belgium)

Austrian (or Austro-Hungarian)

Now. Depending on where you think Gimmelshtump is located in this fictional version of Europe, you’ve got some options more likely than others.

If you think it’s more over here, near Liechtenstein, then it seems as likely he would know Swiss-German (DSGS) as German (DGS).

On the other hand, if he’s down here in the eastern side of things, he might be more likely to know Austrian. Even though ÖGS only seems to have about 10k speakers, he is RIGHT up next to it.

This is sort of convenient, because like DSGS, ÖGS is from the French family of sign language, and so is ASL. The jump from knowing DSGS to picking up a bit of ASL once in America might not be as big as some others. The connection is distant though, so I’m not sure how helpful this would be in practice.

German (DGS) on the other hand, is unrelated to French entirely. Wikipedia says that in 1986 they estimated it had 50k users, so it’s got a lot of potential teachers and users. Eastern Germany has its own divergent dialects, which would probably be the ones Doofenshmirtz would have learned during the Cold War.

The Cold War itself makes all this even more complicated, because I’m not sure what the policies on sign language were on the eastern side of things. Historically, sign language has been treated as an unwanted “lesser” language by able bodied people in positions of authority, who preferred lip reading. I’m not sure how the Russian sphere of influence would have affected teaching and learning sign language, even in a softer cartoon world.

[akanemnon]

That German ask made me wonder: are you German/Austrian/Swiss German/Liechtensteiner/Belgian German/South Tyrolean/Alsatian/Luxembourger/some other kind of native German speaker, or did you learn German at some later point in your life? Sorry if this has been asked before, I just couldn't find any ask to that end anywhere (maybe I'm just blind tho)

No worries, this hasn't been asked before. I was born and raised in Germany lol

[boookfreeak]

okay that's so cool! I've been to Switzerland too (I mena it isn't that far from Germany so yeah hahah) but I've never been to Greece!! I would love to go there too one day, especially Athens :)

WAIT are you from sg??

yes!! was born and brought up here heheh

[haveyoubeentothiscity]

Bevölkerig: 21.503

Sprach: Schwizerdütsch (Swiss German)

Credit to an anonymous submitter and to @smirli for the translation. Merci vielmal!

Translators notes: Swiss german is sometimes regarded as "just" a dialect of german as it is spoken in Germany, but it is oftentimes not understandable by german native speakers. Also the reason for why it is not necessarily regarded as its own language is more to do with political reasons due to switzerland being a country with four official languages and having more division is not practicable.

Swiss German isn't an official language (& without official grammar/spelling) but rather a bunch of dialects, and this translation is only one of them, so I don't know if it counts, but I think it's a fun language and I do speak it daily so I'm just submitting it if you want to use it :)

[its-our-paris]

Me, a German speaker, watching a Swiss documentary about Nemo that just came out, trying to understand his Swiss German.

[moonmeg]

I don't understand Bree's English very well and I have been studying English since I was 3 years old (which is 12 years or so now) should I be worried or is it a variant of English?

I don't think you have to worry about that much. I believe hearing a thicker Scottish accent (or is it more of a dialect? Idk :'>) is rather rare depending on where you are from. You possibly don't come across it very often and that's fine! Neither do I (in real life) lol

If it makes you feel any better, I and many other (native) German speakers will have struggles understanding different GERMAN dialects - Bavarian, Austrian, Swiss, Saxon and Swabian are my personal final bosses fr