My German teacher always claimed that Swiss German and German German (Hochdeutsch) were so different that she needed subtitles to understand it, and she didn't understand why they weren't considered separate languages.
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It depends. There is not one Swiss German but multiple subdialects. The language spoke around the Bern region very far away from German while the one from Zürich or Basel is much closer. Since there is no official written from they never really converged to a homogeneous language.
This sort of thing always makes me think of the English my grandmother from the foothills of the Appalachian mountains spoke. It vas very distinct from standard American English.
They really are very, very different. Knowledge of one helps with the other, but it's far more than just "a couple of weeks to adjust to the accent", for example.
EDIT: It's worth noting that this is mostly a spoken thing, AIUI - most formal/semi-formal writing would be in Hochdetusch rather than a local dialect.
Even Swabian, a dialect spoken mostly in Germany, is almost unintelligible to non-native speakers when spoken by the natives of a certain age.
Unless you're thinking of one of the other Swiss languages, Swiss German is actually a variety of Hochdeutsch.
Historically, Germany used to be divided into countless small fiefdoms and each of them used to speak unique barely intelligible languages.
Hochdeutsch is in opposition to Niederdeutsch which Dutch and arguably English are a variety of.
They are in fact considered separate languages.
Yes but in practice pretty much the same except for some local changes in grammar and vocabulary, in written form.
The dialects are a whole other thing though.
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I'm specifically talking about colloquial Swiss German -- which is, I assume, what you mean by "the dialects" -- and not about Swiss Standard German, which is indeed very similar to German Standard German and can't be considered a different language.
Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
> Any literate German can read the NZZ easily, but they cannot have a colloquial conversation with an average person from Zürich, unless the latter switches to standard German (which is a foreign language for them, though one they have to learn from age 6).
I presume they also pick up a lot of standard German in the media: there's lots of German movies, and Germany has the biggest movie dubbing industry in the world, too. There's some Swiss German media, but not nearly as much as there's on offer in standard German.
The same could be said of all Chinese dialects, which are also formally considered separate languages by all linguists.
They are considered separate languages in the same way that Chinese “dialects” are considered separate languages.
Some Chinese dialects are a lot further apart than eg English and German. They are mostly called 'Chinese dialects' rather than languages for political reasons. Gotta project that unity.
Yes. That was the point I was implying :)
Try dutch, it is combination of German and English!
This, but with something oddly french about it, at least in the way it sounds.
As a native french speaker, no other language gives me that "why don't I understand what they say... oh, right, that's not my language!" feeling. Something with frequencies used, I suppose, but it always puzzles me.
If Switzerland was in the EU, it would certainly be made a separate official language.