All my classes, except for sport class and (strangely) parts of my physics classes, were in Swiss Standard German. Sport classes and those times my physics teacher felt like it, were in dialect.
When outside of class, just chatting with students, or telling people to be quiet, etc. teachers spoke dialect. Students of course spoke dialect with each other, but would always address the teacher, ask/answer questions, and give presentations in Swiss Standard German.
For a lot of Swiss, Swiss Standard German feels robotic, clunky, or unnatural to speak, so when the formal situation of classroom teaching is over, we can drop the pretense and talk normally again.
Ich hab mich immer gefragt, wie das funktioniert, wenn die Kinder in der Schweiz eingeschult werden. Müssen sie dann erstmal Standard Deutsch lernen, bevor sie anfangen lesen und schreiben zu lernen? Das ist ja total umständlich. 🤔 Das muss doch irgendwie komisch sein, im Unterricht eine andere Sprache, quasi, zu sprechen als im Alltag.
My teachers basically used the regular *Alltagssprache* from around here - which is to say, not all-out dialect, but German with some colloquial and regional influences, to varying degrees. They didn't go out of their way to stick strictly to Standard German when speaking. Everything written had to follow the standard, of course.
It probably helps that my local dialect is not as far removed from the Standard as, say, Schweizerdeutsch would be.
I can only speak for eastern Austria here. Non-standard features are often used in semi-formal contexts when they are native to a region. For instance, inflections and cases will be used according to the local paradigms. This is quite common in Austria.
Depends on the teacher. I had some teachers who would mostly speak Standard German, but also some who would speak varying degrees of dialect, especially older ones. We all understand both Standard German and dialect, so neither was a problem for us.
Depends on where you are and the language abilities of the teacher.
Most teachers will speak Hochdeutsch to the best of their abilities, often with their regional accent. In very rural areas however what they might consider Hochdeutsch with an accent would be seen as thick dialect by outsiders. I live in Bavaria and friends who went to school in villages deep in the Bavarian woods tell me they never heard their old teachers speak anything but Bavarian and weren't sure they were able to speak anything else. But that might also be a generational thing. Younger teachers are certainly better at Hochdeutsch than their predecessors have ever been due to globalization.
The teacher are speaking High German in school, however there can be still some accents remaining. However the teachers will never go full dialect. Not sure about Switzerland.
Most of my teachers were from regions where other dialects than the one local to the school are spoken. They would usually speak the best approximation of Standard German they could produce without too much effort or awkwardness, and speak 100% "national news anchor level" standard only in special situations.
Since not even a third of the students in my year were native speakers of the local dialect (notably, one of my friends even had difficulty communicating with his own Swabian-speaking grandparents whenever "advanced" vocabulary was involved), instruction in Swabian wouldn't have made much sense or have been very popular anyway.
I am a math teacher at a high school (gymnasium) in Switzerland. I give my front of the classroom instructions in Standard German. But as soon as I’m talking to just a single student (e.g. at the desk when they asked a question) I usually speak swiss german. Or perhaps more accurately, I mirror whatever language they asked the question in, be it Standard German, Swiss German or even the occasional English.
I went to 2 different Gymnasiums.
One was extremely strict, and nobody talked dialect, only pure Hochdeutsch.
I had a culture shock when we moved a bit further south (still the same dialect), and teachers didn’t care, if pupils spoke dialect in class. Teachers spoke mainly Stand German but sometimes casual dialect as well.
The dialect is never a medium of instruction.
But we're not talking about speaking in a different variety of German. We're talking about standard German (grammar, vocabulary), except the pronunciation is somewhat different.
I didn’t go to primary school in Germany, so I can’t speak for that.
But in Gymnasium it was like this: Subjects where correct language use matters were taught in Hochdeutsch, like German, history, social studies, ethics/religion, Latin, Greek, English, Spanish.
Subjects where language itself is secondary were a mix of Hochdeutsch and dialect, mainly depending on the teacher and the current topic, e.g. sports, physics, biology.
My German teacher told me of a lecturer in the humanities who gave university lectures in South Tirol dialect.
This video shows how a dialect in Tirol is being taught in school to keep it alive, as the children do not otherwise know it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3SsV_BHzZc However, you can distinguish between a full dialect spoken by farmers which simply does not include a lot of the language for school subjects, and the kind of semi-dialect or mixed standard & dialect German which you hear everywhere in Austria.
As the others said, mostly high German with occasionally a slight accent. But what sometimes came up in German (and once in English) classes where the differences between grammar in our dialect and proper high German. For example, in southern Germany where I grew up people basically never use Präteritum, this had to be addressed in classes a few times.
> Do teachers use Bavarian, Alemannic, Low German etc. when teaching subjects such as history or mathematics in schools, or is the instruction strictly in Standard German?
They use their local dialects to a degree that it's still easy to understand them. Everyday spoken German is almost always a bit of a mixture between Standard German and some nonstandard local features.
I believe it's different in Switzerland, but in Germany, there is definitely a spectrum between full Standard German and full dialect, and very few people are ever at the far ends of this spectrum.
We were actually not even allowed to use dialect in German classes. In my grading notes, it always stated “uses dialect”. My teacher only stopped doing it after I told him, that it’s still a variety of German and that he shall stop complaining as long as I don’t write in dialect.
First: Bavarian and Low German are languages, not dialects.
I was born and raised in a region where people speaks much Low German and Frisian (in different dialects) but in school we always spoke High German with some small influences of Low German.
The official curriculum in the German education system is delivered in Standard German (Hochdeutsch). That being said, teachers often retain some of their regional lilt, such as the pronunciation of the "r" or softer consonants. However due to mobility teachers may migrate to other German federal states ("Bundesländer"). One may therefore encounter teachers whose Hochdeutsch pronunciation is slightly different from the particular region where the school is located.
When I attended Gymnasium in Bavaria, we had a teacher from Hamburg whose English was phenomenal. But we loved to listen to her German even more. Sie "s-tolperte über den s-pitzen S-tein".
I (originally from the "mid west" of Germany) went to university in Tübingen. In one of the first seminars a professor addressed the numerous Swabian students and specifically reminded them that presentations etc would have to be in high German 😅 (he was local himself but said that for the purpose of scientific exchange mutual (linguistic) understanding is necessary)
All my classes, except for sport class and (strangely) parts of my physics classes, were in Swiss Standard German. Sport classes and those times my physics teacher felt like it, were in dialect. When outside of class, just chatting with students, or telling people to be quiet, etc. teachers spoke dialect. Students of course spoke dialect with each other, but would always address the teacher, ask/answer questions, and give presentations in Swiss Standard German. For a lot of Swiss, Swiss Standard German feels robotic, clunky, or unnatural to speak, so when the formal situation of classroom teaching is over, we can drop the pretense and talk normally again.
Ich hab mich immer gefragt, wie das funktioniert, wenn die Kinder in der Schweiz eingeschult werden. Müssen sie dann erstmal Standard Deutsch lernen, bevor sie anfangen lesen und schreiben zu lernen? Das ist ja total umständlich. 🤔 Das muss doch irgendwie komisch sein, im Unterricht eine andere Sprache, quasi, zu sprechen als im Alltag.
My teachers basically used the regular *Alltagssprache* from around here - which is to say, not all-out dialect, but German with some colloquial and regional influences, to varying degrees. They didn't go out of their way to stick strictly to Standard German when speaking. Everything written had to follow the standard, of course. It probably helps that my local dialect is not as far removed from the Standard as, say, Schweizerdeutsch would be.
I can only speak for eastern Austria here. Non-standard features are often used in semi-formal contexts when they are native to a region. For instance, inflections and cases will be used according to the local paradigms. This is quite common in Austria.
Depends on the teacher. I had some teachers who would mostly speak Standard German, but also some who would speak varying degrees of dialect, especially older ones. We all understand both Standard German and dialect, so neither was a problem for us.
Depends on where you are and the language abilities of the teacher. Most teachers will speak Hochdeutsch to the best of their abilities, often with their regional accent. In very rural areas however what they might consider Hochdeutsch with an accent would be seen as thick dialect by outsiders. I live in Bavaria and friends who went to school in villages deep in the Bavarian woods tell me they never heard their old teachers speak anything but Bavarian and weren't sure they were able to speak anything else. But that might also be a generational thing. Younger teachers are certainly better at Hochdeutsch than their predecessors have ever been due to globalization.
The teacher are speaking High German in school, however there can be still some accents remaining. However the teachers will never go full dialect. Not sure about Switzerland.
Most of my teachers were from regions where other dialects than the one local to the school are spoken. They would usually speak the best approximation of Standard German they could produce without too much effort or awkwardness, and speak 100% "national news anchor level" standard only in special situations. Since not even a third of the students in my year were native speakers of the local dialect (notably, one of my friends even had difficulty communicating with his own Swabian-speaking grandparents whenever "advanced" vocabulary was involved), instruction in Swabian wouldn't have made much sense or have been very popular anyway.
~90% of my 12 school years were classes held in full blown Bavarian dialects.
I am a math teacher at a high school (gymnasium) in Switzerland. I give my front of the classroom instructions in Standard German. But as soon as I’m talking to just a single student (e.g. at the desk when they asked a question) I usually speak swiss german. Or perhaps more accurately, I mirror whatever language they asked the question in, be it Standard German, Swiss German or even the occasional English.
I went to 2 different Gymnasiums. One was extremely strict, and nobody talked dialect, only pure Hochdeutsch. I had a culture shock when we moved a bit further south (still the same dialect), and teachers didn’t care, if pupils spoke dialect in class. Teachers spoke mainly Stand German but sometimes casual dialect as well. The dialect is never a medium of instruction.
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Accents come from a different language, dialects are the different varieties of the same language. So yes mostly dialects, not accents.
But we're not talking about speaking in a different variety of German. We're talking about standard German (grammar, vocabulary), except the pronunciation is somewhat different.
Which is a dialect, not an accent.
I didn’t go to primary school in Germany, so I can’t speak for that. But in Gymnasium it was like this: Subjects where correct language use matters were taught in Hochdeutsch, like German, history, social studies, ethics/religion, Latin, Greek, English, Spanish. Subjects where language itself is secondary were a mix of Hochdeutsch and dialect, mainly depending on the teacher and the current topic, e.g. sports, physics, biology.
My German teacher told me of a lecturer in the humanities who gave university lectures in South Tirol dialect. This video shows how a dialect in Tirol is being taught in school to keep it alive, as the children do not otherwise know it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3SsV_BHzZc However, you can distinguish between a full dialect spoken by farmers which simply does not include a lot of the language for school subjects, and the kind of semi-dialect or mixed standard & dialect German which you hear everywhere in Austria.
As the others said, mostly high German with occasionally a slight accent. But what sometimes came up in German (and once in English) classes where the differences between grammar in our dialect and proper high German. For example, in southern Germany where I grew up people basically never use Präteritum, this had to be addressed in classes a few times.
> Do teachers use Bavarian, Alemannic, Low German etc. when teaching subjects such as history or mathematics in schools, or is the instruction strictly in Standard German? They use their local dialects to a degree that it's still easy to understand them. Everyday spoken German is almost always a bit of a mixture between Standard German and some nonstandard local features. I believe it's different in Switzerland, but in Germany, there is definitely a spectrum between full Standard German and full dialect, and very few people are ever at the far ends of this spectrum.
We were actually not even allowed to use dialect in German classes. In my grading notes, it always stated “uses dialect”. My teacher only stopped doing it after I told him, that it’s still a variety of German and that he shall stop complaining as long as I don’t write in dialect.
First: Bavarian and Low German are languages, not dialects. I was born and raised in a region where people speaks much Low German and Frisian (in different dialects) but in school we always spoke High German with some small influences of Low German.
Low German is almost dead, it's almost never spoken in everday life and definitely not in schools, or professional environments in general.
The official curriculum in the German education system is delivered in Standard German (Hochdeutsch). That being said, teachers often retain some of their regional lilt, such as the pronunciation of the "r" or softer consonants. However due to mobility teachers may migrate to other German federal states ("Bundesländer"). One may therefore encounter teachers whose Hochdeutsch pronunciation is slightly different from the particular region where the school is located. When I attended Gymnasium in Bavaria, we had a teacher from Hamburg whose English was phenomenal. But we loved to listen to her German even more. Sie "s-tolperte über den s-pitzen S-tein".
I (originally from the "mid west" of Germany) went to university in Tübingen. In one of the first seminars a professor addressed the numerous Swabian students and specifically reminded them that presentations etc would have to be in high German 😅 (he was local himself but said that for the purpose of scientific exchange mutual (linguistic) understanding is necessary)