Orthography
In orthography, the most visible difference from Standard German usage outside Switzerland is the absence of ß (officially abolished in the Canton of Zürich in 1935; the sign fell gradually out of use and was dropped by the NZZ in 1974).
French and Italian Loanwords are written in their original forms - despite the reformation of German language's spelling rules. Majonäse stays Mayonnaise, and Spagetti stays Spaghetti. The newspaper NZZ has even chosen the word placieren, to not have to write platzieren.
Geographic names, like streets, are mostly written together: Baslerstrasse, Genfersee, Zugerberg etc., but also Schweizergrenze, Schweizervolk (very often)
Umlauts at Swiss proper names's beginning are written as
Finally, there are specialities like e.g.
- Bretzel instead of Brezel
Some of the above mentioned specialities are due to the general introduction of the typewriter in economy and administration. Because a Swiss typewriter must be able not to write only German texts, but also French and Italian texts, the limited number of characters wasn't enough for all those languages' special characters. So, the "Eszett" and the high-case Umlauts (Ä, Ö and Ü), but also the high-case accentuated vocals (e.g. À or É) were skipped.
Read more about this topic: Helvetism