Österreich und die Schweiz — Austria and Switzerland

One language, three standards, and a protocol about potatoes

German is spoken as a first language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, South Tyrol and parts of Belgium, and the important thing to understand is that it is not one standard with regional deviations. It is a pluricentric language with three fully codified national standards, each with official status in its own country, each taught in its own schools, each used in its own legislation. The consequence for a learner is mostly reassuring. The grammar is essentially shared, so everything in the previous ninety-four lessons remains true. The written standards differ in one systematic point — Switzerland's abandonment of ß — and in a list of words concentrated in food, schooling and public administration, the domains that stayed domestic while everything else was homogenised by media and trade. You can read an Austrian newspaper now. The consequence that is not reassuring concerns listening in Switzerland. Written Swiss Standard German is close to what you know; spoken Schweizerdeutsch is a group of Alemannic dialects so distinct that German broadcasters subtitle Swiss interviewees, and Swiss speakers themselves treat standard German as a second register learned at school. When a Swiss person agrees to speak Hochdeutsch with you, they are doing something more effortful than a German switching out of dialect, and it is worth appreciating rather than assuming. The status question is not merely academic, and the most striking evidence is a piece of European law. When Austria joined the European Union, its accession arrangements included a protocol on the use of specifically Austrian German terminology, securing the validity of a list of Austrian words — Erdäpfel among them — alongside their German German equivalents in EU legal texts. A country negotiated its vocabulary into a treaty. That tells you how seriously the equal standing of the varieties is taken by the people who speak them, and why treating Jänner as a quaint local form is a small discourtesy. A last practical note on names, because the adjectives are easy to get wrong. österreichisch is Austrian and schweizerisch is Swiss, both as adjectives. The noun for the Swiss variety is Schweizerhochdeutsch or Schweizer Standarddeutsch, and Schweizerdeutsch means the dialects — a distinction worth keeping, since praising somebody's Schweizerdeutsch when you mean their standard German says something different from what you intended. And in Germany, deutsch as an adjective for the variety is ambiguous enough that linguists say bundesdeutsch instead.