17 thoughts on “Language quiz

  1. a dialect of german.. maybe swiss german, but I remember it as being a little more sing-song. I have friends who are bringing up their children trilingual in german, swiss german and english. He´s swiss, she´s german, they lived in the UK for 3 or 4 years.

  2. It’s definitely a dialect of German. It’s tone reminds me of Italian, so it could be Schweizerdeutsch, or maybe Slovenian.

  3. C.S. Lewis-Barrie,
    Google gives no results for those keywords. Can you provide more information, perhaps a link?

  4. Sound a lot like it’s a Swiss German dialect. It sounds like it’s relatively close to standard German, so it’s probably one of the northern dialects.

  5. Yes, it is Swiss German – but the speaker grew up either bilingually or acquired it as a second langague. And it contains a lot of swearing too!!
    The sample also exhibits a relatively new phenomenon in that the dialect could hardly be located geographically but probably by way of sociolinguistic criteria. Swiss dialects are in fact difficult to understand under the unifying umbrella term of Swiss German – they are not distinct enough from other southern German varieties and among themselves are very heterogeneous.
    The sample from YouTube sounds more like someone making fun of Swiss German.

  6. I know no dialect of german. I wish i could learn Bavarian. I’m learning the song “Bayern des samma mia” to help me with it. Oh yeah does “schlömpe” mean bitch in german?

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