Swiss German Words Most Germans Don’t Use (and Why)

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You can speak good German, order lunch in Munich without a second thought, and still be stopped by a shopping list in Zürich. Rüebli, Anke, Bölle, two Gipfeli for the Znüni. Every one of them is an everyday Swiss German word, and none of them is what most Germans would say.

This is a list of those words, sorted by where you will meet them. Many are so normal in Switzerland that they turn up even when the Swiss write Standard German, and the Duden dictionary lists them with the label schweizerisch, Swiss usage. Most have a small story behind them, and a surprising number of those stories are French.

Food and meals

Start with the clock. Swiss German names its meals after the time you eat them, and gives the two snacks in between names of their own:

The Z at the front is what is left of zu. Znüni is what you eat zu neun, at nine o’clock, and Zvieri is what you eat at four. Where Germany has a second breakfast, Swiss German has a name, and the Znüni is serious enough to have its own bag: small children carry it to kindergarten in a Znünitäsche.

Then the shopping list:

Rüebli is a carrot, a Karotte in Germany. It is the word behind Rüeblitorte, the Swiss carrot cake.

Gipfeli is the Swiss croissant. Ask for a Croissant and you will be understood; ask for a Gipfeli and you will sound as if you live here.

Anke is butter and Bölle is an onion, where Germany says Butter and Zwiebel. Neither looks anything like its German counterpart, so neither can be guessed.

Peperoni is the one to watch. In Switzerland it is a bell pepper, the large mild vegetable Germany calls Paprika. In Germany, Peperoni is a small chili pepper, often pickled. Same word, very different salad.

Family

Grosi is grandma, the Grossmutter of Standard German. Families have their own habits here, and you will also hear Grossmami.

Götti and Gotte are godfather and godmother, the Patenonkel and Patentante of Germany. You hear them often, because in Switzerland the role does not end at the christening.

Everyday errands

poschte means to do the shopping, einkaufen in Germany. Ich muess no go poschte is “I still need to go grocery shopping”, and it is one of the first sentences you pick up, because someone is always just about to do it.

Velo is a bicycle, a Fahrrad in Germany. It is short for Veloziped, an old name for the bicycle that came from French. The motorbike has a Swiss word too: Töff, for Motorrad.

Natel is a mobile phone. The name comes from Nationales Autotelefon, the national car telephone network the Swiss PTT opened in 1978. Swisscom stopped using it for its tariffs in 2017, and younger people increasingly say Handy, as Germans do, but the word is far from gone.

Borrowed from French

Two words you will hear in every Swiss shop are French. Merci is thank you, used alongside Danke, and Exgüsi is excuse me, from the French excusez. Then come the nouns:

Why so much French? Part of the answer is that Switzerland has French speakers of its own, just across the language border. The bigger part is history, and it is as much about Germany as about Switzerland.

For centuries French was the language of Europe’s courts and fashions, and German everywhere took in French words. From the seventeenth century, German language purists set out to replace them, and some of their replacements stuck. In the late nineteenth century, Germany’s railways swapped Perron and Billet for Bahnsteig and Fahrkarte.

German-speaking Switzerland did not follow. Its ties to France were close and long: Swiss soldiers served in French armies for about three hundred years, Bernese patrician families raised their sons in French, and well into the twentieth century young people spent a year in French-speaking Switzerland. So the French words stayed. A Swiss train still leaves from the Perron, and you still need a Billett to get on it.

A few of these words are not entirely unknown in Germany: an upmarket salon may call itself a Coiffeur, and Trottoir survives in some regions. The difference is that in Switzerland they are the ordinary words, not the old-fashioned or fancy ones.

The famous tongue-twister

Every list of Swiss German words ends here, and so does ours. Chuchichäschtli is a small kitchen cupboard, a Küchenschränkchen in Germany. It is built from Chuchi, kitchen, and Chäschtli, a little cupboard (on its own, the same word is the locker at the swimming pool), and it packs three of the rasping ch sounds from the back of the throat into four syllables.

That is why it is the word Swiss people traditionally ask visitors to try. You will rarely need it in a sentence. It is a pronunciation test, and a friendly one: if you get through Chuchichäschtli without stumbling, your ch is ready for everything else on this list.

Where Grüezi comes in

Every word in this post comes from Grüezi, our app for learning Swiss German. Its 1,368 words and phrases each come with an example sentence and the Standard German equivalent alongside, sorted into topics such as food, family and transport. Almost every word above can be played as audio in Zürich dialect, generated by text-to-speech, so you can hear Chuchichäschtli before you attempt it, and the flashcards bring each word back just before you would forget it.

If you want the bigger picture first, why the German you learn in class is not the language you hear on a Swiss tram, start with The Swiss German People Actually Speak.