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  • Gabriela

    Member
    August 1, 2020 at 3:54 pm

    My country (Switzerland) is a very special case in terms of languages and accents. First of all although Switzerland is a very small country we have 4 different languages: Swiss German, Italian, French and Romansh. The last one is spoken only by 40 000 people, but there are 4 different idioms (for not to say dialects, because it seems not to be exactly the same….). French is French, but the Italian spoken in the South of Switzerland is also divided in a pure Italian and in different dialects. However, the most specific case is Swiss German. It is spoken in 18 different cantons and it can vary in a way that it might be difficult to understand for Swiss Germans with another accent or dialect. I live in Lucerne and our dialect seems to be quite neutral and easy to understand for other Swiss Germans, whereas the dialect from the canton Wallis is difficult to understand for the rest of Swiss Germany as they partly use completely different words and sounds. Lucerne lies in the middle of Switzerland and there are people they can’t stand at all the dialects from the north/eastern part like the cantons Schaffhausen, Thurgau and St.Gallen. I remember when my current boss was newly elected headmistress of our school, a gentleman from the electoral committee said: “We elected her even though she speaks Schaffhausen dialect.”