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Recently, in our school we've had some foreign exchange students over from Switzerland, Austria and Germany. I found a notebook one of them was using and on it was some language, which I thought, looked maybe like some kind of dialect of German:

"Ha! Heves Gechen Bine"

is what the writing says. Although the 'v' could be an 'r', I'm not sure. If anybody has any ideas, that would be great.

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    If you omit the h in and change e to a, then it's Turkish :D Though it might not be meaningful.
    – Em1
    Commented Jul 14, 2012 at 12:02
  • It is uncommon to write in dialect. In school you learn only to write 'High German' (with some variants in Austria and Switzerland).
    – knut
    Commented Jul 14, 2012 at 13:59
  • It's not too uncommon to write in dialect in Switzerland, especially among teenagers in informal communication (like SMS/text or emails). The above quote doesn't parse in Swiss German though. Why don't you just ask the exchange students?
    – nohillside
    Commented Jul 14, 2012 at 14:41
  • That does seem the easier option. I just thought I'd give you all a glance first, see if any lightbulbs lit up. Thanks anyway!
    – MattyBeales
    Commented Jul 14, 2012 at 15:14
  • I am also friends with some of the Swiss exchanges and they do indeed write in their dialect.
    – MattyBeales
    Commented Jul 14, 2012 at 15:16

3 Answers 3

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I'm pretty sure it's not some Austrian or Swiss dialect.

Some theories given the few words:

  1. It's English

    Ha! Here(')s Gechen Bine.

    The author omitted the apostrophe and "Gechen Bine" could be a proper name. People from Bavaria or Austria sometimes use the last name / first name word order.

  2. It's Turkish

    The word heves means passion or eagerness in Turkish. The other words could be a name in this case too.

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    "Gechen" could also stand for geçen = vergangen, verflossen - I vote for Turkish! Translated to German: "Ha! Bine hat Schluss gemacht."
    – Takkat
    Commented Jul 17, 2012 at 8:14
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Doesn't sound anything like austrian-german or german-german. Could however be Schweizerdeutsch from Switzerland, which is quite different.

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    It doesn't sound Swiss German at all.
    – nohillside
    Commented Jul 15, 2012 at 6:07
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It could be Romansh, a language which is spoken in parts of Switzerland.

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  • What makes you think this could be Romansh? What would it translate to?
    – Arsak
    Commented May 21, 2019 at 12:45

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