this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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When overwatch was pretty new i checked out the overwatch subreddit. I saw a post about how good the voice lines are in arabic of the newly launched hero Ana was, and their whole interaction with phara. Other people pointed out how accurate other voiclines of different languages were. So i took a shot at it and said that it's weird that the mercy character who is from from Zurich, Switzerland speaks german, and not swiss german.
People were shitting their asses about my comment. People explained to me that german and swiss german is the same thing, and people in Switzerland speak german. I respectfully explained that i lived in zurich, switzerland for 25 years and people simply do not speak german with each other.
That did not matter tho and people from all over the world gave their two cents about what they think they know about the place where i grew up in.
Not so sure about the "all over the world" part - I think it's pretty common knowledge in Europe even among non-German speakers that Swiss German is a bit of a different animal, and I don't imagine many people from Asia or Africa joining in with strong opinions about this either.
Not pointing any fingers, but I have my suspicion where those people came from.
Yeah, I'm suspicious of the French as well!
Yeah all over the world was a bit hyperbolic, most were american by default some pointed specifically out they were from sweden and Finland for some reason
I just googled “what language do they speak in zurich” and the first result is Swiss German
That sounds incredibly annoying
Google is wrong though. They simply speak German. I've only been there once, briefly, and you don't know that, but you should trust me anyway.
That's wrong. I've also been there once, and they only spoke English and some gibberish. I don't speak German, so I should know.
Why google when you know things.
Why know things when you can simply trust your intuition?
I'm curious to know a bit about Swiss German now. Would the average German speaker from Germany understand it? Is there any desire to just call it "Swiss"?
It depends. People from southern germany would understand it mostly. But the more north you go the less they understand it. People from austria tend to understand it pretty well. But we have a lot od different accents as well. But it also depends on the accent. Some thick accent is really hard to understand.
Switzerland has four official languages, so just calling it Swiss would sort of confuse matters.
True, but no one says i speak swiss french or swiss italian.
No, an average German speaker from Germany wouldn't understand it. It's basically an extremely heavy German dialect, belonging to the group of Allemanic German dialects. Non intelligible dialects are not uncommon in many parts of Germany, though. In some German regions (e.g. southern Black Forest), the local dialects also belong to the group of Allemanic dialects. The locals from there might have a somewhat easier time getting used to Swiss German dialect varieties.
I have heard that complaint more recently and it wasn't downvoted or anything, so I'd like to think you made an impact!
It wasn't even a complaint, it was more like everyone was praising blizzard for being so culturally appropriate and 100% accurate (lol) and i was just mentioning that it's not true for this character.
Before overwatch i played team fortress 2 and i was used to a way more wholesome community and somehow never thought that it doesn't carry over.
I thought it's really funny when i made a post that it shouldn't be possible for Reinhardt and mercy to get out of her ult and as far as i remember no one agreed and i caught a lot of shit for even bringing it up. They later changed that and no one seemed to complain ever about it. I think at this point i realised that reddit isn't really for me