Sandra commented on my last post that Schwiizerdüütsch (Swiss German) is a spoken and not a written language.
Strange, I was under a very different impression. In the past nine years, I seldom received anything in writing from a Swiss colleague or acquaintance that wasn't written in Swiss German. I have post cards, e-mails, text messages and chat messages to prove it — all of them unintelligible.

I'll explain what Sandra meant.*
Because the official language in northern Switzerland is German, some rules have to exist governing orthography and grammar. The Germans have been working on the rules for many years now and supply them in the shape of a Duden — the official reference books for the German language. The Duden even contains a number of words that are only used in Switzerland, just to make sure the Swiss know how to spell them. **
Because The Rules only govern High German and the Swiss never bothered to jot down the rules for Swiss German, we have a free-for-all when anyone wishes to write in their everyday language. The result is chaotic.

One of the things people here lament when they acquire a new mobile telephone, is the fact that the text programmes are set to T9.
"You can't write an SMS", they moan [Short Message Service].
T9, for the uninformed, tries to guess what you intend to write and, as soon as you have typed two characters, will begin to suggest words for auto-completion.
It can't speak Schwiizerdüütsch!

Here are two examples of written chaos:
At work there is a group of between eight and ten colleagues that cook for each other every Friday. I sent a chat to one of them asking who was due to cook, the coming Friday. The answer:
"Hemmo nonig abgmacht, luägemo denn vorzuä amel."
The translation, or thereabout:
"Wir haben's noch nicht abgemacht, wir schauen [entscheiden] dann laufend [immer]."
We haven't reached an agreement yet, we decide as the occasion arises."
If you study the two different versions of German, I'm sure you'll notice the similarities.

I sometimes ask for a translation but this particular young lady is incapable of writing High German — and I'm not joking.
A gem that she was unable to supply a written translation for and I don't understand even now:
I asked if she had produced a specific design ...
"Nei, abo übonoo so wjä sie's mer gshickt ka hend..."
I gathered she was trying to tell me that someone had sent it to her. Bele, one of my readers, sent me the translation:
"Nein, aber so übernommen wie Sie es mir zugeschickt haben ..."
No, I used it as it was sent to me - so easy, when you see the correct solution.

I sometimes can't make up my mind which is worse – written Schwiizerdüütsch or the spoken Appenzeller dialect.

*Some people say that Swiss German is dialect. I'm not quite sure that a language that develops at different speeds in different regions doesn't become several languages ...
Take Gaelic, for instance. Both the Scots and the Irish speak Gaelic (which developed from Celtic) but they don't understand each other or the Welsh (Celtic).

**Old High German, today, only used in Switzerland, it often states.