“Monsterbank” is the Swiss-German word of the year
Published: Tuesday, Nov 28th 2023, 06:10
Retour au fil d'actualité
The Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) has chosen "Monsterbank" as the Swiss-German word of the year. "Chatbot" and "ghosting" follow in the other places.
"Monster Bank" landed in first place in the ranking because the relief following the merger of UBS and Credit Suisse (CS) was immediately followed by fears about the CS rescue. This was announced by the university on Tuesday. According to the ZHAW, the main fear was that the newly created monster bank could harbor even more risks.
The university justifies second place for "Chatbot" with the statement that voice robots, which work with artificial intelligence and natural language processing, have caused a sensation this year. They have become part of our everyday lives.
Finally, according to the ZHAW, third-placed ghosting appears to be spreading from interpersonal relationships to other areas of life. For example, the term is now also used when job applicants no longer get in touch.
The ZHAW chooses the words of the year for Switzerland not only in German, but in all four national languages. In French, "décombres" was voted word of the year, in Italian "GPT" and in Romansh "Solarexpress".
The Department of Applied Linguistics at the ZHAW in Winterthur is responsible for the word of the year. It analyzed the Swiss-AL database and determined the words per language that were used more frequently or in a significantly different way than in previous years. A jury of language professionals selected the three most striking words from this list, as well as from suggestions made by the public and based on their own experience.
©Keystone/SDA
French 
English 
German 
Spanish 
Arabic