Abstract
Switzerland is a multilingual country with four official languages: Swiss German (the mother-tongue of 75% of the population), French (20%), Italian (4%), and Rhaeto-Romanic (or Romansh) (1%). The term ‘Swiss German’ does not refer to one unique language, but to a multitude of different dialects. All Swiss-German dialects, except for that spoken in and around Basel, belong to the High Alemannic family. The dialects of Switzerland can be roughly divided into three subgroups along geographic lines: the Northeast, with Züritütsch (Zurich German) as its main representative, the Northwest with Berntütsch (Bernese) as the most prominent, and the South, comprising the somewhat more archaic dialects, e.g. Walser dialects, spoken in the remote mountainous regions.
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Schönenberger, M. (2001). General Properties of Swiss German. In: Embedded V-To-C in Child Grammar: The Acquisition of Verb Placement in Swiss German. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0798-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0798-6_1
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