Swiss Standard German and the language of the law

A national variety of the standard language

German is a pluricentric language with several national standard varieties. The standard German written in Switzerland differs from that of Germany and Austria in vocabulary, spelling, grammar and pronunciation, differences that are recognised in the reference dictionaries of the language. Linguists call the specifically Swiss elements Helvetisms.¹ Some of them belong to everyday life, such as Velo for bicycle or parkieren for parking. Others belong to the state and the law. The Swiss decision is a Entscheid, where German usage prefers Entscheidung. An item on the agenda of a meeting is a Traktandum, the consultation of parties and associations on a draft law is a Vernehmlassung, and a member of a cantonal government is a Regierungsrat. The enforcement of monetary claims is called Betreibung, a term that has no counterpart in German law.²

The most visible orthographic difference is the absence of the Eszett. The Federal Chancellery’s guide to German spelling, which defines the house orthography of the federal administration, notes that the ß gradually disappeared in Switzerland from the 1930s onwards, so that Swiss texts write ss in all positions. The same guide observes that German-speaking Switzerland shows “loyalty” to the other parts of the country by keeping French and Italian loanwords closer to their original form, for example Communiqué in place of a Germanised spelling.³ The Chancellery’s writing instructions add further conventions that immediately identify a Swiss text, such as the apostrophe as a thousands separator in figures like 1’000. They also require that Swiss particularities be taken into account in federal texts.⁴ A contract drafted in Zurich for a German client can therefore be recognised as Swiss at a glance. The form signals the legal system behind the text: a document that writes Strasse and CHF 1’000’000 announces that Swiss law and Swiss conventions are likely to apply.

The vocabulary of Swiss law

The differences between Swiss and German legal language go well beyond spelling. They arise because the two countries codified their private law separately and at different times. The Swiss Civil Code, drafted by Eugen Huber on the basis of a draft published in 1900, was adopted on 10 December 1907 and entered into force on 1 January 1912, together with the revised Code of Obligations. Huber sought to combine tradition and innovation by incorporating local customs into the national codification.⁵ The Swiss codes are commonly praised for a language that remains accessible to the educated citizen, whereas the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch of 1896, in force since 1900, is known for its abstract and technical style.⁶ The result is a family of parallel terms that look alike but are not interchangeable. In Swiss law the set-off of mutual claims is Verrechnung (Articles 120 et seq. of the Code of Obligations), whereas German law speaks of Aufrechnung (§§ 387 et seq. BGB). A contractual penalty is a Konventionalstrafe in Switzerland (Article 160 OR) and a Vertragsstrafe in Germany (§ 339 BGB). The executor of a will is a Willensvollstrecker under Article 517 of the Swiss Civil Code and a Testamentsvollstrecker under § 2197 BGB. Condominium ownership is Stockwerkeigentum under Articles 712a et seq. ZGB, where German law uses Wohnungseigentum under the Wohnungseigentumsgesetz. The right to build on another’s land is a Baurecht under Article 779 ZGB and an Erbbaurecht under the German Erbbaurechtsgesetz.

In most of these pairs the underlying institutions are similar, although the details differ. The danger for cross-border practice lies elsewhere, in words that exist in both systems with different meanings. Baurecht in German usage primarily denotes the public law of building and planning, while in Swiss private law it denotes a property right. A German lawyer who reads a Swiss land register extract that mentions a Baurecht may misunderstand it entirely. The Swiss Hypothek is used in everyday language for a mortgage loan secured on real estate, whereas the German Hypothek is a specific, now rarely used security right that has largely been replaced in practice by the Grundschuld. The Swiss Schuldbrief, a negotiable mortgage note under Articles 842 et seq. ZGB, is the security of choice in Swiss mortgage lending and has no exact equivalent in current German practice. Such false friends show that a common language does not guarantee a common understanding. Two lawyers can read the same German word and think of different legal institutions.

Court language and the Federal Supreme Court

The courts reinforce the Swiss character of legal German. The Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne renders its judgments in one of the official languages, as a rule in the language of the contested decision, and publishes its leading cases in the official collection BGE (Entscheidungen des Schweizerischen Bundesgerichts) in the original language. A judgment on a Zurich case is therefore usually written in German, a judgment on a Geneva case in French, and a judgment on a Ticino case in Italian, in accordance with the rule of Article 54(1) of the Federal Supreme Court Act (BGG) that proceedings are conducted in an official language, as a rule in the language of the contested decision. Lawyers who practise before the Federal Supreme Court must therefore read case law in at least two languages. A leading case on Swiss banking law may well be written in French because it arose in Geneva, even though its reasoning governs a dispute in Zurich. Several private publications translate important decisions for readers of the other language regions, among them Die Praxis, which translates into German all French- and Italian-language decisions intended for publication in the official collection and offers an archive going back to 1982.⁷

The style of Swiss judgments also differs from that of German judgments. Swiss courts write in numbered considerations (Erwägungen), quote their own precedents by volume, part and page of the official collection, and frequently discuss the three language versions of a statute when the wording is unclear. German courts write in a style shaped by the Gutachtenstil and Urteilsstil of German legal education and quote the decisions of the Bundesgerichtshof by volume and page of BGHZ or BGHSt. The terminology of the courts themselves reflects the difference in constitutional structure. The Swiss Bundesgericht is the single supreme court for civil, criminal, administrative and social security law, whereas Germany divides the supreme jurisdiction among the Bundesgerichtshof, the Bundesverwaltungsgericht, the Bundesfinanzhof, the Bundesarbeitsgericht and the Bundessozialgericht, with the Bundesverfassungsgericht standing apart. At cantonal level Zurich knows the Obergericht, the Handelsgericht and the district courts (Bezirksgerichte), none of which corresponds precisely to a German court. The Zurich Commercial Court, discussed in chapter I.I, is a specialised court of first and only cantonal instance with lay commercial judges. German law also knows lay commercial judges in the Kammern für Handelssachen of the regional courts under §§ 93 et seq. GVG, yet these chambers are part of an ordinary court hierarchy with a full appeal to the Oberlandesgericht.

Notes

1. “Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variantenwörterbuch_des_Deutschen: Ulrich Ammon, Hans Bickel, Jakob Ebner et al., Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). The dictionary “betrachtet Deutsch als plurizentrische Sprache und stellt die standardsprachlichen Varianten der Länder mit Deutsch als Amtssprache einander gleich”. ↩
2. Wikipedia, “Liste von Helvetismen”, section on politics and administration, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Helvetismen, which lists Betreibung, Entscheid, Traktandum, Vernehmlassung, Stimmbürger and Regierungsrat among the administrative Helvetisms. Cited for orientation in the absence of a better openly accessible source. ↩
3. Schweizerische Bundeskanzlei, Leitfaden zur deutschen Rechtschreibung, 4th updated edition 2017, Rz. 1.7 and section 3, https://www.bk.admin.ch/dam/de/sd-web/GApRW2tzdhqZ/rechtschreibleitfaden-2017.pdf. The guide is binding for texts in the Federal Gazette and the official collections of federal law. ↩
4. Schweizerische Bundeskanzlei, Schreibweisungen: Weisungen der Bundeskanzlei zur formalen Gestaltung und zur Sprache von Texten des Bundes, 2nd updated edition 2013 (corrected 2015), https://www.bk.admin.ch/dam/de/sd-web/YVHazXZRkqKn/schreibweisungen.pdf. The instructions also refer to recommendations on the use of Anglicisms and require German official texts to be formulated in a gender-equitable manner. ↩
5. HLS, Dominique Manaï-Wehrli, “Huber, Eugen”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D4533.php. ↩
6. Kurt Siehr, “Swiss Civil Code (ZGB)”, in Max Planck Encyclopedia of European Private Law (2012), https://max-eup2012.mpipriv.de/index.php/Swiss_Civil_Code_(ZGB), noting that the code is appreciated even outside Switzerland for its “easy comprehensibility” and that it has no general part of the kind found in the German BGB. ↩
7. Die Praxis, https://www.pra.ch/, describing itself as the most comprehensive archive of translations of Federal Supreme Court decisions, with more than 7,700 decisions in its database. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.