Background
The definitive work for German orthography, the Duden, explicitly declares a number of helvetisms as correct Standard German - albeit with the annotation, denoting that the usage of the word is limited to Swiss territory. But yet not each and every word may be considered part of the "Swiss standard language"/"Swiss standard German" category, because its frequency of usage must be evaluated as well; if this does not apply, or if its use is known to span one or more certain dialectal regions only, they must be categorized "dialectal" (German: mundartlich, often abbreviated mdal.)
In orthographical terms, the most significant difference to Standard German outside Switzerland is the absence of ß. (After having been officially abandoned in the Canton of Zürich in 1935, this character gradually fell into disuse, until it was eventually dropped by the NZZ in 1974.)
In everyday language, Helvetisms may both be used consciously and unconsciously by a Swiss German native speaker. Classic examples of Helvetism usage throughout the whole literary work are found in a great part of Swiss literature, notably Jeremias Gotthelf's novels located in the Emmental; a contemporary example would be Tim Krohn in his Quatemberkinder. Another group, the most notable of whom is Peter Bichsel, deliberately use helvetisms to arouse a sort of emotional attachment to the readers' home country: Bichsel is notorious for using dialectal words like "Beiz" (instead of "Kneipe" ), or "Kasten" (instead of "Schrank" ) in his "San Salvador" short story. Lastly, there is yet another group of authors whose book readers' are known to be located all over the German-speaking territory (Germany, Austria, Switzerland as well as some smaller minorities in other European countries) and thus traditionally refrain from using any helvetisms in their literary works.
Also words which are used outside Switzerland, but which originate from Swiss German may be called "Helvetisms."
Analogously to "Helvetisms", there are also Austricisms and Germanisms (also Teutonicisms).
Read more about this topic: Helvetism
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