> The Swiss do not speak German at all. > They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages.

> The Swiss do not speak German at all. > They speak various forms of Swiss-German dialects, which are related to German, but altogether different languages. These statements are at best wrong, but actually not even that. There is no hard difference between languages and dialects. Whether a variety gets called "language" or "dialect" is mostly a matter of convention. The Swiss German dialects are obviously not Standard German. But neither are the dialects spoken in Germany. They are still German dialects. Also, I'm pretty sure that all German-speaking Swiss also speak Standard German even if it's not their native dialect. > Yet somehow, you can perfectly express complex thoughts in Swiss-German and still be understood, so all I've read in this thread about how grammatical complexity is a form of error-correction There is a difference between "you cannot express complex thoughts in Swiss German" and "Swiss German does not have a particular method of error correction that Standard German has". It's not like Swiss German were just a simplified variant of Standard German.