this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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When overwatch was pretty new i checked out the overwatch subreddit. I saw a post about how good the voice lines are in arabic of the newly launched hero Ana was, and their whole interaction with phara. Other people pointed out how accurate other voiclines of different languages were. So i took a shot at it and said that it's weird that the mercy character who is from from Zurich, Switzerland speaks german, and not swiss german.
People were shitting their asses about my comment. People explained to me that german and swiss german is the same thing, and people in Switzerland speak german. I respectfully explained that i lived in zurich, switzerland for 25 years and people simply do not speak german with each other.
That did not matter tho and people from all over the world gave their two cents about what they think they know about the place where i grew up in.
I'm curious to know a bit about Swiss German now. Would the average German speaker from Germany understand it? Is there any desire to just call it "Swiss"?
It depends. People from southern germany would understand it mostly. But the more north you go the less they understand it. People from austria tend to understand it pretty well. But we have a lot od different accents as well. But it also depends on the accent. Some thick accent is really hard to understand.
Switzerland has four official languages, so just calling it Swiss would sort of confuse matters.
True, but no one says i speak swiss french or swiss italian.
No, an average German speaker from Germany wouldn't understand it. It's basically an extremely heavy German dialect, belonging to the group of Allemanic German dialects. Non intelligible dialects are not uncommon in many parts of Germany, though. In some German regions (e.g. southern Black Forest), the local dialects also belong to the group of Allemanic dialects. The locals from there might have a somewhat easier time getting used to Swiss German dialect varieties.