Slang by Committee: Switzerland Institutionalizes Teen Speak

Leave it to Switzerland to turn youth rebellion into a curated institutional project. Under the watchful eye of researchers at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, who have supervised the national Word of the Year selection since 2017, teenagers across four language regions were tasked with formalizing their informal chatter. The result is an instructive look at Swiss priorities: even adolescent slang must be orderly, locally controlled, and insulated from foreign dominance.

In the German-speaking cantons, the top spot went to "würd mi", an abbreviation for "das würde mich nerven"—a phrase expressing mild annoyance or polite detachment. Chosen by a ten-member jury of adolescents aged fourteen to nineteen from a list of 140 candidate words, the term defeated heavily favoured English imports. The runner-up positions went to "nöd so deep"—a hybrid combining local dialect with the English concept of taking things lightly—and "peak", an Anglicism denoting the pinnacle of something, often deployed with dry irony on social media.

The jury made no secret of its motives: selecting a distinctly Swiss-German dialect phrase ensured that neighboring Germany could not claim the title. In addition, the term convinced judges due to its versatile application in everyday conversation. The rules of this linguistic exercise, managed by the university's Department of Applied Linguistics, were predictably strict. Submissions from thirteen- to twenty-year-olds were filtered to exclude proper nouns, derogatory terms, and anything resembling a political stance.

Beyond the German-speaking majority, Switzerland’s multilingual reality asserted itself through distinct regional winner lists. In French-speaking cantons, top honor went to "goumin", an expression for heartbreak originating from Ivoirian Nouchi slang, followed by "pain" to describe an attractive individual and "battle d'aura" for charisma contests. Italian speakers selected "aura" to denote charisma—a word that previously claimed top honors in Germany in 2024—alongside "chill" and "crazy". Meanwhile, Romansh youth crowned "bursa", a local term literally meaning wallet but used ironically to call someone an idiot, alongside "lascha cuschinar el", a direct translation of the English phrase "let him cook", and "spido".

These choices provide a fascinating glimpse into how adolescent language is framed and sanitized in an official capacity. The outcome demonstrates that even when adopting global digital culture, Swiss youth remain attached to local nuance and carefully regulated linguistic boundaries.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com