Two languages under one name

The hard part of German in Switzerland is not the grammar, though the grammar is the same as in Berlin: three genders, four cases and verbs that wait at the end. The hard part is that the language you can read and the language you hear around you are not quite the same thing, and you have to learn to move between them.

The past has only one tense in speech. Swiss German has no simple past at all. Where a German says ich war, a Swiss says ich bi gsi, I have been, and every story is told that way: mir sind uf Luzärn gfahre, we went to Lucerne. If you speak Standard German, use the perfect tense too; it is what your listener would say anyway, and the simple past sounds like a book being read aloud.

A handful of small words carry the conversation. Nöd or nid is not, chli is a little, öppis is something and gäll? at the end of a sentence means right? or isn't it? You will hear luege for look, schaffe for work and poschte for doing the shopping. Meals have their own little words built on z: Zmorge is breakfast, Zmittag lunch and Znacht dinner.

Even the written German is Swiss. The standard language here has its own vocabulary, printed on signs and menus and not used across the border. A bicycle is a Velo, the pavement is the Trottoir, ice cream is Glace, chicken is Poulet and cream is Rahm, not Sahne. You parkieren a car and grillieren a sausage. Many of these came in from French, and so does the most common thank-you in Zurich: merci, or merci vilmal.

Money and time have nicknames. A franc is a Stutz in casual speech and a five-franc coin a Füfliber. Prices are read as two numbers, so 4.50 is vier füfzg. And halb acht means half past seven, not half past eight: German counts the half hour towards the next one, which is the single most common way to arrive an hour late for a dinner invitation.

Huus, Ziit and Chuchi: German that never moved on

Most of what makes Swiss German sound strange to someone who learned German at school is not an accent but an age. Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, most of the German-speaking world turned its long vowels into diphthongs, so Hus became Haus and Zit became Zeit. The Swiss valleys never followed. A house is still a Huus, time is Ziit, wine is Wii and the country itself is d Schwiiz. Hear a long, flat ee or oo where your textbook has ei or au, and you are hearing the older word, not a mistake.

Two vowels, said one after the other. Where Standard German has a single long vowel, Swiss German often keeps a slide of two: guet for good is "goo-et", lieb is "lee-eb", and the greeting you will use most, Grüezi, has the same glide in its middle. And a k at the start of a word usually becomes the throat sound the kit teaches below: Kind is Chind, Käse is Chäs, the kitchen is d Chuchi. Practise the greetings, numbers and thank-yous in dialect, because those are what people say to you; for everything else, speak the Standard German you know and listen for the answer in either.

Six things that catch visitors out

Toast with eye contact, every time. When glasses are raised you say Proscht or Zum Wohl, look each person in the eye as your glasses touch, and touch every glass at the table before you drink. Looking away during the toast, or drinking before everyone has clinked, is noticed. At a big table, people reach across; nobody minds waiting.

The bill is usually split, exactly. Among friends and colleagues, each person often pays for what they had, and waiters are used to it: they will ask zäme oder separat?, together or separate?, and work through the table one by one. Offering to pay for everyone is generous, but it is not expected, and insisting can make people uncomfortable.

Your shoes come off at the door. In many Swiss homes, guests take off their shoes in the hall, and some hosts keep slippers for visitors. Look at what is lined up by the door and follow it. Bring something small: flowers, a bottle of wine or good chocolate, and it is polite to bring it unwrapped, ready to be opened or shared.

Cross only on green. Even on an empty street at midnight, many Swiss wait for the little green figure, and crossing on red in front of children is seen as setting a bad example. On zebra crossings, cars do stop for pedestrians. Bicycle lanes are taken seriously too: walking in one brings a ring of the bell and a look.

The shops close early, and Sunday is closed. Outside the big railway stations, airports and petrol-station shops, most supermarkets close at seven or eight on weekdays, earlier on Saturdays, and stay shut all Sunday. Stations are where people do their emergency shopping, which is why Zurich main station is crowded on Sunday afternoons.

A rifle on the train is normal. Many Swiss men do military service, and you may see a young soldier on a train with a rifle, travelling home in uniform. This is completely normal and nobody reacts. Do not take photos of soldiers or ask to hold the weapon; a friendly nod is all anyone expects.

Spoken by everyone, written by almost no one

Nearly two thirds of the Swiss live in the German-speaking part of the country, and almost all of them speak dialect at home, at work, on the radio and in parliament's corridors. It is not a sign of class or education: the bank director and the bus driver speak the same way. Standard German, which the Swiss call Schriftdeutsch, written German, is for newspapers, school and formal speeches, and many Swiss feel slightly stiff speaking it, the way you might feel reading a letter aloud.

That has one result travellers rarely expect. Address a shopkeeper in Standard German and you will be answered in it, politely, but many German-speaking Swiss would rather switch to English than speak Hochdeutsch with a foreigner, and the younger and more urban they are, the faster they switch. If you want to practise, say so, and most people will slow down and stay in German with you.

Text messages, family chats and social media are the one place the dialect gets written, each person spelling it as it sounds in their own valley, so the same word can appear three ways in one group chat. You will not need to read it. What is worth learning is the greeting: a few words of dialect at the start of a conversation show that you know where you are, and it is noticed.

A greeting for every size of room

Choose the greeting by who you are greeting. Grüezi is for one person you would address as Sie; Grüezi mitenand greets a whole group, a waiting room or the table you are joining. With friends and with people your own age in a relaxed setting, it is Hoi, Sali or Salü. In Bern the formal word is Grüessech instead, and saying Grüezi there marks you as a visitor from Zurich, which Bernese people will mention.

Goodbye has its own ladder. Uf Widerluege is the polite goodbye to a shopkeeper or a stranger, and Adieu or Ade are common and warm. Between friends it is Tschau or Tschüss. In shops you will also be wished en schöne Tag or es schöns Wuchenänd, a nice day or a nice weekend; Merci, gliichfalls, thanks, you too, is the reply.

Du is offered, and it is a small occasion. The older or more senior person offers it, often over a drink, and from then on you use first names. It comes faster than it used to: young people, sports clubs, many offices and the long tables of a mountain hut all reach du quickly. But a neighbour you have nodded to for ten years may still be Frau Keller, and that is not coldness. It is respect, and it can be very friendly.

Directness is a courtesy here. The Swiss tend to say what they mean and expect you to do the same. A request without bitte sounds rude, but a request wrapped in three layers of hints sounds confusing. Chönd Sie mir hälfe?, can you help me?, is enough. When someone says es isch nöd so tragisch, it's not so tragic, they mean that the problem is fine and not worth discussing.

Zurich, Bern, Basel, and the valleys beyond

Every canton, and in the mountains almost every valley, has its own dialect, and Swiss people can usually place a stranger within a few sentences. Zurich speaks quickly and sounds, to other Swiss, a little pleased with itself; it is the country's largest city and its money centre, from the banks of Bahnhofstrasse to the bars of the old industrial district along the Limmat. Lake swimming starts as soon as the water warms, from wooden bathing houses that have stood on the lakeshore and the river since the nineteenth century.

Bern is the federal city, deliberately not called the capital, and its dialect is famously slow and round. The old town is lined with stone arcades, called Lauben, that let you walk through it in the rain without an umbrella, and the river Aare loops around it in a green-blue curve. In summer, people walk upstream along its banks and float back down through the city to the public baths below the parliament.

Basel sits where Switzerland meets France and Germany, and its dialect, Baseldytsch, sounds more like Alsace than Zurich. The Rhine is the city's summer swimming pool: people seal their clothes in a waterproof bag shaped like a fish, the Wickelfisch, and drift downstream with it under the bridges.

Central Switzerland around Lake Lucerne is where the country began, in the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. Lucerne's wooden Chapel Bridge was built in the fourteenth century and largely rebuilt after a fire in 1993. In the east, Appenzell keeps its painted houses and its open-air assembly, the Landsgemeinde, where citizens still vote by raising a hand in the main square. In the high south-west, the German of the Upper Valais is so old-fashioned and distinct that other Swiss struggle with it, and Graubünden adds Romansh to the mix.

Switzerland, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Interlaken is Latin for between the lakes, and the town sits exactly there, on the strip of land dividing Lake Thun from Lake Brienz.
• Public fountains run day and night in Swiss towns and almost all of them pour drinking water; Zurich alone has more than a thousand, and people refill their bottles at them without a second thought.
• Sunday is a legally quiet day in most buildings, which means no drilling, no lawnmower and no bottles thrown into the glass bank until Monday morning.
• Officially bilingual towns write both of their names with a slash, so the city on the lake of the same name is Biel/Bienne and the station sign carries both.
• Four languages are national here: German, French, Italian and Romansh, the last of them spoken in the mountain valleys of Graubünden.
• Milk chocolate was worked out in Vevey in 1875, when Daniel Peter solved the problem of water in the mixture by using the condensed milk his neighbour Henri Nestlé was making.
• The country's Latin name, Confoederatio Helvetica, exists so that no one language gets top billing, and it is why the currency is written CHF and the web domain is .ch.
• Winter tourism began in St. Moritz in 1864, when the hotelier Johannes Badrutt bet his English summer guests they would enjoy the place in the snow and offered to pay their fare home if not.
• Znüni and Zvieri mean the nine o'clock and the four o'clock: the mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks that the Swiss working day is built around.
• The Aletsch Glacier, the largest in the Alps, winds down from the Bernese peaks with long dark stripes of rubble running along it like lane markings.
• Fondue is eaten out of one shared pot called a caquelon, and the golden crust that sets at the bottom, la religieuse or the nun, is prised off at the end and split between everyone at the table.
• Almost every bottle of Swiss wine is drunk inside Switzerland, which is why Chasselas, the country's signature white grape, is so rarely seen on foreign shelves.
• The Swiss railway clock, designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944, has a red second hand that pauses at the top of the minute until the whole network ticks over together.
• Zopf, a rich butter bread plaited into a long braid, is a Sunday-morning fixture on Swiss breakfast tables, and its name means simply plait.
• Velcro was invented by George de Mestral, who came home from a walk in the Jura in the 1940s and put the burrs stuck to his dog's coat under a microscope.
• The Red Cross was founded in Geneva in 1863, and its emblem is simply the Swiss flag with the two colours swapped.
• Cellophane was invented by Jacques Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist who set out to make a stain-proof tablecloth and ended up with a transparent film instead.
• South of the Alps, in Ticino, palm trees and camellias grow along the lake promenades, and the light and the climate feel borrowed from Italy.
• Bündnerfleisch, the air-dried beef of Graubünden, is pressed into a neat rectangular block while it cures, so it can be cut into slices thin enough to see light through.
• Ovomaltine was developed in Bern in 1904 from malt, milk, egg and cocoa; its name joins the Latin ovum, egg, with malt, and English speakers know the same drink as Ovaltine.
• The Alpine ibex vanished from Switzerland and was brought back in the early 1900s from animals quietly carried over from Italy; its curved horns now appear on the flag of Graubünden.
• Absinthe was first distilled in the Val-de-Travers in the canton of Neuchâtel, where the drink is still known affectionately as la bleue.
• Gruyère has no holes in it at all. The famous ones belong to Emmentaler, and they are pockets of gas left behind by bacteria as the wheel ripens.
• Victorinox, maker of the Swiss Army knife, is named for the founder's mother Victoria and for inox, the French word for stainless steel.
• When the Föhn blows, a warm dry wind pouring down the northern slopes of the Alps, Swiss lore blames it for headaches, sleepless nights and short tempers.
• Chuchichäschtli, Swiss German for kitchen cupboard, is the word locals hand to visitors as a test, because it packs in the throat-clearing ch sound that no outsider gets right first time.
• The Rex peeler, with its swivelling blade and plain aluminium handle, was designed by Alfred Neweczerzal in 1947 and lives in almost every Swiss kitchen drawer.
• The World Wide Web was written at CERN outside Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee proposed it in 1989 as a way for physicists to share documents.
• Jungfraujoch, at 3,454 metres, is the highest railway station in Europe, and the train reaches it through a tunnel bored inside the Eiger and the Mönch.
• The Swiss flag is square rather than rectangular, a shape it shares with the flag of only one other country in the world.
• Helvetica was drawn in 1957 by Max Miedinger at a type foundry in Münchenstein near Basel and first sold as Neue Haas Grotesk, then renamed after Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland.
• The vineyard terraces of Lavaux above Lake Geneva are said to ripen under three suns: the one in the sky, the one reflected off the water, and the heat stored in the stone walls.
• The alphorn has no valves and no finger holes, so it can play only the natural harmonic series, including one famously off-key step that musicians call the alphorn fa.
• Bern's Zytglogge tower has put on the same performance since the sixteenth century: a rooster crows, a parade of little bears turns past and a golden jester rings his bells before the hour strikes.
• A mobile phone is a Natel in Swiss German, short for Nationales Autotelefon, and the word baffles Germans and Austrians completely.
• The letter ß never appears in Swiss writing: newspapers, keyboards and street signs use a double s instead, so the German Straße is simply Strasse here.
• Allegra is how you greet someone in Romansh, and the word literally tells them to be glad.
• Schwingen is wrestling in a ring of sawdust, in jute shorts worn over the trousers, and the winner's first duty is to brush the sawdust off the loser's back.
• Ask for a café renversé in Lausanne and you get a reversed coffee: the milk goes into the cup first and the coffee is poured in after it.
• Cervelat, the sausage roasted over campfires all over the country, is slit into a cross at both ends so the tips curl back like petals as they cook.
• Raclette takes its name from the French verb racler, to scrape: the cut face of a half-wheel of cheese is warmed until it slumps, then scraped straight onto potatoes.
• Hiking signposts here are yellow and tell you how long the walk takes rather than how far it is, and the marked network they belong to runs to tens of thousands of kilometres.
• The country dates itself to a pact sworn in 1291 on the Rütli meadow above Lake Lucerne, and the first of August is still marked with bonfires lit on the hilltops.
• Instead of soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix, French speakers in Switzerland say septante and nonante, and in Vaud, Valais and Fribourg eighty is huitante.
• Albert Einstein wrote the papers that made his name in 1905 while working as a clerk in the patent office in Bern.
• Röstigraben, the rösti ditch, is the affectionate name for the invisible line between the German-speaking and French-speaking halves of the country.
• Basel's Fasnacht begins at four in the morning on the Monday after Ash Wednesday, when every light in the old town goes out and thousands of painted lanterns move off through the dark.
• The Swiss National Park in Graubünden was founded in 1914 and is run by unusually strict rules: stay on the path, pick nothing, and let fallen trees lie where they fall.
• Rösti started as a farmer's breakfast in the canton of Bern, grated potato pressed into a pan and fried until it holds together like a cake.
• In autumn the cows come down from the high pastures in a parade called the Alpabzug, or désalpe in French, wearing crowns of flowers and bells the size of buckets.
• Birchermüesli was invented around 1900 by the Zurich doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner as food for his patients, and in its first form it was mostly grated apple with a little soaked oat.
• Citizens vote on actual questions several times a year, and a hundred thousand signatures is enough to put a proposal to the entire country.
• Grüezi, the greeting you will hear a hundred times a day in Zurich, is worn down from Gott grüez i, meaning may God greet you.
• Meltwater from the Swiss Alps ends up in three different seas: the Rhine runs to the North Sea, the Rhône to the Mediterranean and the Inn to the Black Sea.
• The Pope's Swiss Guard has stood at the Vatican since 1506 and to this day recruits only Swiss citizens.
• The Matterhorn is a near-perfect pyramid whose four faces point roughly north, south, east and west, and its summit ridge is the border with Italy.
• Rivella, one of the country's best-loved soft drinks, is made from milk whey, the liquid left over when cheese is made.
• Postal buses announce themselves with a three-note horn lifted from Rossini's William Tell overture, and no other vehicle on Swiss roads may sound it.
• In the mountains around Sardona a sharp line runs across the cliffs where rock roughly 250 million years old was shoved up and over rock far younger than itself, and the area is protected as a World Heritage site for it.
• Zurich sees winter off by burning a snowman called the Böögg on a pyre, and the minutes his head takes to explode are read as a forecast for the summer.