The French invented the word chauvinism :) They take their language very seriously likewise. I work for a French company and even though the official language is English you're kind of a second rate citizen if you don't speak it. Or write last names in all caps or quotation marks like <<>> :) They just are that way :P
And if you ever work in any other countries, you would see the same in different language. Work in a Swiss company? Hope you enjoy German.
At one stage, French people has to stop this self deprecating and think elsewhere is much better and only French does this or that. It is not.
Not my experience in Swedish company. n=1. It's not just business. Initially I felt awkward in shops, asking directions, etc using English. People just drop into English seamlessly.
We're a Swiss company and we speak everything! English is the main language, but the engineers are mostly Eastern European but French-educated so they speak French. Some of the team is German/Czech/Polish, so they speak some German.
The common policy though is that if someone does not speak the language of the ongoing conversation in the room, everyone switches to English. A policy that I picked up from my Japanese internship days.
Both things are wrong. It's not a dialect in the sense that it is not the same language with special intonation, some new words and new idiomatic sentences. It has its own (much simpler) conjugation and declension scheme. Much closer in feel to a creole.
Its written form is also not german. Good luck reading some of the züri by mike comic strips as a german reader.
On the other hand my gf is from Mallorca and they have their own language distinct from Spanish. And she understands more french than me because it's closely related. Not enough to have a conversation though.
I don't know about Scottish-English and Irish-English, to be honest. Would an English native understand them?
Germans don't understand Swiss-German, and Swiss-Germans don't consider German as their mother tongue. Whereas the French being spoken on the French part of Switzerland is slightly different from the French from France, but people still consider that French is their mother tongue.
Not sure if that answers your question, or if you were just complaining about the fact that I made a difference between German and Swiss-German :-).
Depends where in Scotland and how much they've had to drink.
On a serious note, words like ken, bairn, breekies, stramash are not that well understood by English people. But it's unlikely a Scot would use them when talking to an Englishman.
I learnt German in Germany, and I understand the Swiss. When you are waiting 4h to cross the gottard tunnel, you have plenty of time to listen to the radio. It is hard to understand just like any dialect when you are not used to it, but I would not call it a different language.
It is very unlike a French hearing Italian even though it is the same Latin root and words look the same on paper, grammatically it is very different.
Apparently not enough to learn that nobody in Switzerland would ever call that "the Swiss"? There is not even "one Swiss-German".
> grammatically it is very different.
In your 4h in the Gotthard tunnel, did you get to see how Swiss-German is written differently than German? Also the grammar is fairly different.
But yeah those are dialects, nobody said they weren't. I just said "they don't speak German, but Swiss-German" (more as a "fun fact" than trying to be pedantic), and they would definitely correct you if you said it is the same. Whereas a Suisse Romand (the French speaking Swiss) will tell you that they speak French, just like a French-Canadian from Quebec.
As a German speaker that has worked in Zürich, the parent is correct.
Wikipedia has the following to say:
The dialects that comprise Swiss German must not be confused with Swiss Standard German, the variety of Standard German used in Switzerland. Swiss Standard German is fully understandable to all speakers of Standard German, while many people in Germany – especially in the north – do not understand Swiss German.
Hmm, I would still say that Quebecois is French, but with some (maybe many) local words. Swiss-German is really a dialect (actually multiple dialects).
Those are all perfectly valid French words, but the meaning is slightly different ("la fin de semaine" in France may include Thursday/Friday, whereas in Quebec it's really for Saturday and Sunday (instead of "weekend")).
All caps started becoming more popular in English because a lot of people now have names where the first and last names are interchangeable and it was causing uncertainty.
I wouldn’t mind this becoming an international standard. Going back and forth between the west and Asia, no one is ever sure upon first look which is my given name and which is my surname because of it being written in a different order across different ID cards, registration forms, etc.
I suppose I wouldn't mind it either, so to speak. But I think you should just get assigned an ID number at birth. Ideally it would encode the place and time of your birth, parents' ID numbers and sibling count, what the weather was like when you were born and what was forecast, ...
Caps are much easier to handle in database. All customers family names are stored in caps at my company (in France).
It really avoids confusion when you call them
