Swiss Alps, Chalets and Dialect

From The Dubois County Daily Herald - December 14, 1950
HARK THE HERALD | By A. T. Rumbach

The ride of 103 Kilometers from the St. Gotthard tunnel to Lucerne was all too short for the passengers who were getting their first view of the Swiss Alps.   They took up every available inch of space at the windows of the train to watch the jagged mountains in their garb of dark greens pines and cap of lamb-wool snow, glistening in the bright moonlight.

Adding the human touch to the panorama were the solitary chalets and the chummy villages which dotted the mountain-sides and valleys.   And so, all too soon, the train came to a halt in the station of Lucerne.

The process of clearing the station from train to busses interrupted, but did not end the evening’s viewing of strange and beautiful sights.   For enroute to our hotels, the buses skirted the well-illuminated shores of Lake Lucerne, which for sheer beauty is not surpassed by any lake in the world.

We arrived at our hotel, the Carlton-Tivoli about ten o’clock tired and ready for a good night’s rest in the very attractive, spic and span rooms with twin beds, covers invitingly tucked back; and a feather-light but bulky feather-bed doubled up at the foot end to protect one against the crisp autumn mountain air.   So after a snack and a glass of brown beer, cellar-cold, we took to the covers to rest up for a full day of Alpine sight-seeing tomorrow.

The crossing over from Italy to Switzerland was, in a way, like a home-coming, for here, on every side, instead of an unfamiliar language, the Italian, or the forced tourist English, one heard spoken, that is, Swiss German which greatly resembles the dialect of Baden spoken by so many of the older citizens of Dubois county about a generation ago, and a trace of which is still to be found in what German is still spoken here.

I was surprised to hear this variety of German “slang” spoken not only by peasants and servants, but also by trades people and businessmen, in fact by people in general, as long as they were speaking among themselves.   But the moment they are approached by a “foreigner” addressing them in German, or by a government official or a clergyman, they invariably answered in “High-German,” or “schriftliches Deutsch” (German as it is written).   Needless to say they were surprised when we talked to them in their own Swiss dialect.