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  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ignatow View Post
    For some reason, I thought you lived in Germany or Austria. So I suppose Swiss German is a dialect of Standard German?
    Actually I was born in Germany, but lived in Switzerland most of my life. Germany & Austria speak exclusively German. Austria and the German state of Bavaria actually belonged to the same kingdom for most of the last millennium.
    Switzerland is different, it consists of several small mountain states ('Kantone', most of them just valleys), that formed a confederation after the end of the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation' ~1650, and we luckily refused to join the EU (the woke craze gains traction here as well, though).
    Most of Switzerland speaks a German dialect "Schwyzerdütsch" (they speak German in Tirol, the most northern part of Italy, as well), and in parts of Switzerland they do speak French and Italian. Germans, Swiss and Austrians understand each other, the written language is even the same. Bavarian and Austrian German is almost identical.
    In Switzerland children at school learn mandatory German, French, Italian and the regional - mostly Helvetic - dialects of their valley, and English as foreign language.
    The Scandinavian countries Sweden, Norway and Denmark have nothing to do with that, they are at the other end of the continent. But their languages are very similar to each other (as far as I know they mostly do understand each other), but as a German spaker I don't understand them. Funnily I can guess the meaning of written Norwegian pretty well though. These three languages are Germanic languages as well though (just like English, Scottish, Danish, Yiddish).
    Interestingly Finnish, the other big Scandinavian country, is completely different. It's a Slavic language, like e.g. Hungarian (who knows how they ended up there ).
    Last edited by Socialism_is_terrorism; 09-25-2022 at 07:12 AM.

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