My daughter speaks perfect English, but of course with a German accent. What cracks me up every time is that she speaks a German accented Lancashire dialect.
I can’t do it, try to say, for instance: “Ee by gum” and sound like a German.
“…a weng!”
Germans speak pretty good English. I wish I could speak German as good as them speaking English
By the way, what language does Swiss military use primarily? German, French or Italian or a mix of all 3?
Depends on the region. It’s no good speaking French in the German part of Switzerland if a hefty % don’t have a clue what you are saying.
A Swiss neighbour had to do his annual military refreshment course and was given a squad of Italian speakers to command, a wasted couple of weeks
But his arms and hands got a lot of exercise.
My son was doing his military service this time last year and it was a mix of French and German primarily.
The location of the service is determined by function rather than language so you get a mix of languages pretty much everywhere.
Despite being a French speaker he was based in Kloten as that’s where the function he chose was based. Some functions are offered in multiple locations and in that case recruits are sent to a barracks in their own linguistic region.
In his case out of the 250 recuits that session the majority of them were Swiss German with around 60 French speakers and a handful of Italian speakers.
They were divided into sections, there was a solely French speaking section, a couple of solely German speaking and one bilingual section.
The Italian speakers were put with the French speakers.
Orders were given in both French in German but not all the officers spoke both languages competently.
The dorms were primarily one language but some of them were mixed.
The Italians were all together but there were a couple of forms of mixed French and German speakers.
The female recruits were all together in one dorm.
After the initial 20 weeks of basic training they were all mixed up for the final exercises depending on what field they were put in.
Out son ended up in a group of 12 with 10 German speakers and only one other French speaker. The sergeant only spoke Swiss German and Portuguese ut fortunately the other French speaker was Portuguese so he was able to translate for him.
Our son does speak reasonable high German but his Swiss German improved massively during his time in the army.
He was lucky as he speaks English and most of the other recruits spoke English pretty well so they mostly communicated in English.
Once the officers found out he was English the German speakers used him quite frequently to translate stuff into French for them.
In short it really depends on where you are but there doesn’t seem to be an official language.
There are clearly more and more Swiss people who speak a language other than the 4 national languages of Switzerland. More and more ATMs and websites also include English and in some cases also Spanish. Yes it makes sense to communicate in English because more and more Swiss prefer it to a second Swiss language.
I find it fascinating how Switzerland encourages multilingualism, it’s inspiring! At home, we often mix our mother tongue with French so as not to lose our roots. But I think that mastering a local language is essential to really integrate.