A Matter of Distance

What forms of address reveal about multilingual Switzerland

Crossing from Zurich to Lugano, on my way to an interpreting

assignment at the University of Italian-speaking Switzerland.

One small word, many distances

In Switzerland, translation is not simply a matter of moving from one language to another. It also means navigating a set of habits and expectations that rarely appear in dictionaries, yet profoundly shape the way people relate to one another.

One of the most revealing examples concerns a distinction that English has largely lost: the difference between formal and informal ways of saying “you”.

In Italian, French and German, choosing one form over the other is rarely just a grammatical decision.

When informality feels natural

In Italian-speaking Switzerland, the informal tu is part of everyday communication. It is not confined to family and friends, but often extends naturally into situations that elsewhere might call for greater formality.

You walk into a boutique in Locarno and the sales assistant greets you with: “Hi, are you looking for something in particular?” No one perceives this as disrespectful. If anything, it feels welcoming.

If I were addressed formally instead, my first reaction would probably not be how professional, but something rather more human: Do I really look that old?

A small misunderstanding, perhaps. Yet a revealing one.

When the same word means something else

Cross the Alps, and the same gesture can take on a different meaning.

In Zurich, at my daughter's kindergarten, I instinctively addressed the teacher — young, friendly and entirely at ease in her role — using the informal du. To me, it felt perfectly natural. To her, much less so.

She did not say anything. Yet the shift was noticeable. That du seemed to reduce the professional distance between us, as though it placed her role in a space that felt overly informal. In that context, the formal Sie is not about coldness. It is about recognition.

Translating relationships, not words

This is where translation stops being a purely linguistic exercise and becomes something more delicate.

There is no straightforward equivalence between tu, du and Sie. Each choice expresses a different understanding of distance, respect and familiarity.

An Italian text that addresses its readers informally — “Discover our offers” — may come across as overly direct or insufficiently professional if transferred unchanged to a German-speaking Swiss audience.

And the reverse is equally true: a message built around Sie may feel entirely appropriate in German and unexpectedly stiff in Italian.

A question of balance

The issue is not grammatical but relational. And that is precisely what makes it difficult to translate.

Across Switzerland's language regions, it is not only the words that change. The expectations attached to them change as well.

Small distances

In the end, the choice is not really about a pronoun.

It is about distance.

Or about closeness.

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Martina Knecht

Text and images © Martina Knecht

This article is part of the series Quasi la stessa cosa: brief observations on how words shape our world (2026).