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How to Swissify your GermanI know very little German and even less Swiss German. Nonetheless, during my three-week gallavant around Switzerland noticed some regular sound correspondences between the two. Swiss German doesn't have an official spelling, but since this is text and I have no hope of pronouncing it anyway, my recipe is expressed in terms of spellings. Note also that this is based on observations I made during a trip all around German-speaking Switzerland, so it's likely that there is no single dialect which incorporates all of these variations. In short: Not to be taken seriously.
Recipe for turning German into Swiss German
- If the word begins with -chen, change the -chen to -li. Otherwise, if it ends in an n, don't pronounce the n (as in rappen, Interlaken, morgen etc), if not, add -li to the end. I think that this was a clever marketing trick on the part of Switzerland's neighbour Liechtenstein, to make .li domain names more popular.
- Change each solitary k or g into ch. (as in Chuchichäschtli) Be sure to never pronounce it [ç], that would be too easy. Throw away your Throaties. This is perhaps due to intense patriotism in reaction to Liechtenstein's underhand tactics, prompting a desire to get Switzerland's own abbreviation into speech as much as possible.
- Change any ck into gg. (as in zytglogge, egg)
- Remove any ch from the end of a word. (as in i or Züri) You've used up all your ch's elsewhere by this time.
- Wherever there is an ü, add either an e or another ü after it. As far as I know üe never occurs in High German but it's all over the place in Swiss place names, and of course the greeting grüezi. I've seen it in Strasbourg too.
- Change each ei to y or i. (zytglogge again, or of course Schwyzerdütsch/Schwiizertüütsch) I don't know what effect this has on pronunciation but I've seen it around.
From these rules alone I deduced that müesli is a Swiss invention. The only way it could be more Swiss would be to be chüesli.
I drew a guest cartoon for Spamusement for the subject line 'Ear Training *hacks*' which refers to Swiss German.This page has been accessed  times since 2024-11-16 18:14:46 Last updated: 2007-01-05 23:53:53
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