by Diccon Bewes
Defining the national identity is hard enough for any country, but for Switzerland it’s a challenge up there with climbing the Eiger. As a country it lacks many of the elements that usually bind a nation together: a common language, state religion, monarchy, an overriding ideology or revolutionary ideals. But that’s not to say that Switzerland is not a nation; it’s just not one in the stereotypical sense. It is maybe the best example of national self-determination. It is a country because it wants to be one, or, as the Swiss say, a Willensnation. Despite the different languages, Lugano, Lausanne and Lucerne are all Swiss, simply because that’s what their inhabitants want. In some ways this makes Switzerland as fictional as Heidi, a place that exists because its people believe in it. Like heaven, only more mountainous and with better public transport.
Nevertheless, being an atypical nation doesn’t mean that it has no identity, more that it’s harder to identify. Perhaps that’s where Heidi comes in. Despite being far too uncomplicated and carefree to be truly Swiss, the fictional Heidi is in fact the perfect personification of the Swiss nation: loving and giving to her nearest and dearest but wary of foreign complications, a determined heart beneath that picture of innocence, and devoted to her homeland above all else. Most of all she’s an illusion the Swiss still believe in, just like the country itself.
SWISS SURVIVAL TIP NO 11: MASTERING SWINGLISH
Contrary to official statements, there are in fact five national languages in Switzerland. Alongside German, French, Italian and Romansh, there is also Swinglish, the product of Swiss meets English. It may be less developed than its linguistic cousins Franglais and Spanglish but, within its home country, it’s widely spoken and widely (mis)understood. Before we get to grips with Swinglish, it should be noted that it is entirely different from the liberal sprinkling of English words that appear in normal Swiss speech, such as ticket, sandwich, quickie, management, online, sofa, hobby, snack and so on.
Swinglish has two levels, Basic and Advanced, though paradoxically the former is actually harder for outsiders to understand. The reason for this is twofold: the English words are hugely outnumbered by the Swiss ones and, more disconcertingly, they sometimes have completely different meanings from their original English root. For example, a mobile phone is known as a Handy in Swinglish – an appropriate enough word but with a totally different meaning in English, where it’s not even a noun. At this level, most Swinglish words are there for one of two reasons. First, it is cool. Using an English word is so much trendier than a dull old Swiss one, especially when trying to sell something. Secondly, it overcomes the language barrier. It’s much easier to use one English word, such as Sale, which can be understood by everyone, than translating it into four separate words; it saves space for one thing. Swinglish is thus at once both hip and helpful.
A good everyday example is the word Drink, which in Swinglish roughly means semi-skimmed milk; in any Swiss supermarket there is Milch (or lait or latte), the real deal with all its fat intact, and then Drink. To a native English speaker, using the word Drink in relation to milk or juice (as in the dreaded ‘fruit juice drink’) usually means it’s been watered down and/or sweetened up. For Swinglish speakers, it merely means milk that is not whole, but using an English word makes it appear trendy, and so more marketable, and avoids translating ‘semi-skimmed milk’ in triplicate.
The trouble for foreigners is that when the Swiss speak English, some forget that many of the words they’re using are actually Basic Swinglish. This is fine when misspelt, such as (k)now-how often losing its k, or when the meaning is self-explanatory, for example anti-baby-pill. But just as American and British English have different meaning for pants, purse and rubber, so too can Swinglish and English produce moments of mutual misunderstanding. A few examples, with the Swinglish meanings given:
Hit – a special offer; it comes after, and is joined to, the word it is qualifying, producing some unfortunate results: Price Hit becomes Preishit, and Dish of the Day is Tageshit. Not too appetising for English speakers.
Mobbing – bullying, usually within the workplace.
Old-timer – a vintage car, but also buses and trams, though not men.
Pudding – a specific dessert rather like a blancmange.
Smoking – a dinner jacket.
Tip-top – very good.
Trainer – a tracksuit.
Wellness – a spa, though normally used as an adjective, as in wellness weekend or wellness hotel.
Advanced Swinglish is far easier for outsiders to understand, for the simple reason that sentences are constructed in English rather than Swiss. Advanced Swinglish speakers usually speak good English but their Swinglish roots reveal themselves every so often. It’s not always a question of vocabulary, as most Advanced speakers have learnt to drop (or translate) many Basic words. At this level it’s a matter of ‘mid-translation’; that is, translating from their mother tongue but not quite reaching English. For example, the Swiss German Hoi zäme! becomes the Swinglish ‘Hello together!’ (the literal translation) rather than ‘Hello everyone!’.
The most noticeable quirk of Advanced Swinglish is its grammar. Many nouns develop a plural where none existed before (informations, behaviours) while other plurals pop up with odd spellings (babys, partys). Verbs present more of a challenge. Swinglish speakers do an awful lot of things reflexively – dressing, hurrying, shaving, imagining, remembering and sitting down are all things you do to yourself. The problem lies in the mid-translation of the reflexive pronoun. In Swinglish, ‘we meet us’, ‘I shame me’ and ‘we see us’ are all often heard. Then there’s the use of the continuous tense, which most Swinglish speakers do with relish, possibly because it doesn’t exist in Swiss. ‘Are you speaking German?’, said in perfect Swinglish, is a question designed to confuse everyone involved.
Perhaps the trickiest part of Advanced Swinglish to master is the pronunciation. It seems just like English, but small variations make all the difference. I found that out the hard way when I started work in the Stauffacher English Bookshop:
Swiss customer: I need a book on cheeses.
Me: Okay, I’ll show you what we have.
In the Cookery section, I get out our three books on cheese.
Customer, shaking her head: Not cheese. CHEE-SES.
At this point, I am wondering if cheese has a plural. Was it like sheep, with none? Or more like fish, plural when more than one type is involved? Or was this a Swinglish plural, like informations? Not wanting to get into a discussion on that, I try again, going with the plural in the hope that it helps.
Me: So you are looking for something about cheeses?
Customer: Yes. Books on holey cheeses.
Me, smiling: Ah, a book on Swiss cheeses!
Customer, looking at me as if I am simple: There is no Swiss cheeses.
Me, now wondering about a singular verb with a plural noun: We do have some books on Swiss cheeses.
Customer, very irritated: Cheeses was not Swiss. He was the Son of God.
Me, finally catching up: Oh you mean, Jesus.
Customer: Yes, this is what I have been saying. A book on cheeses.
The problem, apart from me being rather slow that day, lies in the Swinglish speaker finding it hard to differentiate between J and CH in English. In Swiss German, a J is a Y (so that Jesus is pronounced Yay-sus), whereas a CH is similar to the one at the end of loch. The English pronunciations sound the same to a Swinglish ear, and vice versa. I’ll certainly never forget my encounter with a Swiss Jesus.
That’s it, until we are seeing us next time in Switzerland.
CONCLUSION
The Swiss are rich but like to hide it, reserved yet determined to introduce themselves to everyone, innovative but resistant to change, liberal enough to sanction gay partnerships but conservative enough to ban new minarets. And they invented a breakfast cereal that they eat for supper. Privacy is treasured but intrusive state control is tolerated; democracy is king, yet the majority don’t usually vot
e; honesty is a way of life but a difficult past is reluctantly talked about; and conformity is the norm, yet red shoes are bizarrely popular.
It’s perhaps no surprise that the Swiss are contradictory, given how divided their country is. Since its earliest days Switzerland has faced geographic, linguistic, religious and political divisions that would have destroyed other countries at birth. Those divisions have been bridged, though not without bloodshed, but Switzerland remains as paradoxical as its people. While modern technology drives the economy, some fields are still harvested with scythes (all the hilly landscape’s fault); it’s a neutral nation and yet exports weapons to many other countries; it has no coastline but won sailing’s America’s Cup and has a merchant shipping fleet equal in size to Saudi Arabia’s. As for those national stereotypes, well, not all the cheese has holes, cuckoo clocks aren’t Swiss and the trains don’t always run exactly on time.
This book started at the foot of the Matterhorn and finished above the Eiger. Those two famous peaks may both look like mountains, but they are as different as two people from Zurich and Basel. It has been said that a Swiss person only feels Swiss once he leaves the country; until that point his heart belongs to Bern, Schwyz, Ticino or any of the 23 other cantons. But no matter what language they speak, where they live or who they pray to, what all Swiss have in common is a will to remain Swiss. They trust each other not to falter in the face of all their contradictions, but to harness them for the greater good. It doesn’t always work – just look at their bloody past – and it isn’t always easy, as their uncertainties about the future show. The secret of Swiss success is making the whole far more than the sum of its parts, but at what price?
For the collective to succeed, the individual must be sacrificed on the altar of conformity. Switzerland is, like its cheese, a country of round holes; square pegs need not apply. It also has no heritage of monarchs and presidents, as from the very beginning it’s been a cooperative entity. I think that’s why there are so few Swiss celebrities: it’s not in the Swiss nature to stand out in a crowd; if you do, you might get cut down to size. Egoism is not popular in Switzerland, as ex-Bundesrat member Mr Blocher found out. This lack of figureheads is so Swiss that the Swiss themselves don’t even notice. Switzerland has always been a collective enterprise and that’s just how they like it: deciding for themselves, with no one telling them what to do.
Perhaps that strong sense of self-determination is why the Swiss are satisfied with the lot they have chosen – even to the degree of seeming self-satisfied. True, their national self-esteem has taken a few dents recently (Nazi gold, the Swissair collapse, the banking secrecy traumas), so that it’s no longer the norm to see their country as the envy of the world (unless you’re an SVP supporter). But while most Swiss like living in their orderly, controlled environment, some find it simply too restrictive. It can’t be a coincidence that so many Swiss go abroad as a way of finding fame, or even finding themselves: César Ritz, Ursula Andress and Le Corbusier, for example. They escaped the prison, as Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt might have put it. He once said that his country was a prison where the prisoners themselves are the guards. It’s a little harsh – Switzerland may be a desert island but it’s no Alcatraz – though the Swiss do go to extraordinary lengths to protect themselves, their money and their country from the outside world. Perhaps it’s more fortress than prison.
Then again, a better analogy is a bee hive. All those industrious bees look very similar but they each has its own role in achieving a common goal: to protect the queen. In this case she is Helvetia, that elegant, beautiful and well-armed woman who graces the coins and lends her name to the stamps. She is the reason the Swiss all work as one, even if that means compromising their sense of self as a result. Of course, a wonderful by-product is honey, or in Swiss terms, chocolate. If one thing is worth a bit of collective mentality, it’s that.
To truly understand the Swiss, one elderly Swiss man told me, all you have to do is read William Tell. He’s right in that the Tell story sums up the Swiss character very well, but isn’t it odd that a fictional tale written by a German is the basis of a nation? Then again, it’s the myth of Switzerland, be that Tell or Heidi or the wartime experience, that is as important as the reality. In essence, Switzerland is a marketing exercise on a national scale, using every possible means to be successful. The German-speaking majority quite readily adopt clichés such as fondue and chocolate, both invented in the French part, because they add to the country’s sales image, an image based on being somewhere clean, neat, precise and efficient. Living up to that can be hard, but it works because the Swiss themselves believe in it. And they put community before individual to achieve it.
To describe this common desire to pull together, the Swiss rarely use the motto inscribed in the dome of the Federal Parliament: unus pro omnibus omnes pro uno, or one for all, all for one. All very uplifting, but this is the twenty-first century so what’s needed is a trendy new word. English is the new Latin, so the word is Swissness. Just as they once created a Latin name for their country to overcome their differences, the Swiss now use an English, or actually Swinglish, word for their collective sense of nationhood. While Swissness may mean nothing to outsiders, it encapsulates the country’s sense of self like nothing else. Using a made-up foreign word to express a national desire may sound contradictory, but this is Switzerland. This is the landlocked island, and there’s no bigger contradiction in terms than that.
EPILOGUE
How much does a country like Switzerland change in two years? On the surface possibly not that much, despite other places having seen rather momentous change, but Switzerland is not in the Middle East or part of the Eurozone or even the focus of big anti-capitalist protests. Since the first edition of Swiss Watching was published in June 2010, the country has of course changed, albeit in its own, unhurried way. There has been a general election and a new(ish) government, the big dig under the Alps reached a crucial stage, and the economic crisis arrived in Switzerland, though not in the same form as elsewhere. Not forgetting that an epitome of Swiss national identity was shaken to its core – or that the Swiss learnt how they appear to one Englishman living in their midst. So here’s this Swiss watcher’s look back at recent history, starting with that election.
ROUND ONE TO THE RIGHT
Swiss general elections are like the World Cup: they occur once every four years and the build-up is almost as important as the actual event. In this case, the qualifying round was fought almost a year before the final and the star of the show was a black sheep. You may remember him from Chapter Four, the one who was being kicked off the Swiss flag by three white sheep. Having helped the right-wing SVP win the previous election, he was brought back in November 2010 for his real purpose, one that made the minaret ban look tame. This time it wasn’t just Muslims who were targeted by the latest SVP hate campaign, but all foreigners. The Ausschaffungs-initiative was a referendum that proposed automatically expelling foreign criminals, from rapists down to benefit cheats, back to their country of origin. No appeals, no exceptions. For Secondos born and brought up in Switzerland that might mean being sent back to some tiny village in southern Italy that their grandparents left in the 1960s.
Funnily enough, the SVP’s list of crimes worthy of expulsion didn’t include corporate fraud, tax dodging or secreting away ill-gotten gains. Clearly those sorts of foreign criminals are welcome to stay, presumably because they aren’t a threat to little old ladies, but most likely because they make the country richer and the SVP didn’t want to alienate its friends in big business. Nor were traffic offences (which account for 60% of all crime in Switzerland) mentioned, probably because 55% of the offenders are Swiss. It wouldn’t do to highlight that. However, many other statistics to do with foreigners were liberally publicised; the trouble is that statistics sometimes don’t tell the whole truth.
‘One of the highest populations of foreigners in Europe’ is a cry often heard, using the official 22.4% as its
basis. But is it right? In Swiss terms yes, but only because Switzerland’s citizenship rules are very different from other countries’; if you compare like with like, so that the playing field is level, the picture changes dramatically – then Switzerland has only 6% foreigners, much the same as Britain and far less than Germany’s 8.2%. Two rules make all the difference. Immigrants in most EU countries can apply for citizenship after five years’ residency, rather than the Swiss 12 years. Secondly, Secondos are treated better elsewhere. Children born in Germany, for example, are citizens if just one parent has been a permanent resident for over eight years; in Britain it is only a five-year minimum. Not so in Switzerland, where those ca. 350,000 Secondos have no citizenship rights.
Despite all that, or maybe because of it, the initiative passed with a clear majority – 52.3% of the vote and 17.5 cantons. However, it won’t be so easy to translate into legislation because, as with the minaret ban, it conflicts with European human rights law and possibly the Swiss constitution. What that victory really did was set up the expectation that the SVP would again conquer all in the general election of October 2011.
A POLITICAL SOUFFLÉ
Surprise! For the first time in 20 years, the SVP lost both votes and seats in both houses of parliament, although it maintained its position as the largest party. In the end the Swiss had had enough of xenophobic paranoia and divisive campaigning, especially at a time of economic uncertainty. Or maybe they merely came to their senses and realised that the SVP is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a party run by millionaires posing as men of the people. Just over 26% (a fall of 2.3%) of Swiss voted SVP, losing the party eight seats in the Nationalrat and preventing its big guns (including Herr Blocher) from storming into the Ständerat. One SVP poster had vainly proclaimed that ‘Schweizer wählen SVP’ (Swiss vote SVP), but in 2011 three-quarters of them didn’t.