Embrüf
Upper Valais German
Said in the canton of Valais
Upwards
Embri — downwards
Embrüf
Where it comes from
Ask a Swiss German speaker which word sounds most like Valais: according to the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, the great dictionary of Swiss German, the answer that comes up most is embri and embrüf. Everyone guesses that they give a direction; outside Upper Valais, people just don’t know which one. Embrüf means upwards, embri downwards.
The üf at the end of embrüf is the “up” heard all over Swiss German. The beginning is murkier. For the Idiotikon, it is an old aber, “again”, still alive at the end of the 19th century in several cantons, Bern above all, and kept by written German in abermals. Its unstressed vowel weakened, the next one dropped out, an m slipped in before the b: what is left is embr-. An article from the magazine Wir Walser, reproduced on the website walliserdialekt.ch, sees the prefix an- in it instead. So the specialists do not quite agree.
Embri took a detour. It comes from aberiin, “again inwards”: in the Bernese Oberland it points towards the head of the valley. In Valais it ended up meaning “downwards”. Why? The Idiotikon offers an idea without insisting on it: for people in the valleys, “inwards” meant the village centre, the market or the church, which often lay further down, as Visp does for the valleys of the Vispa, Zermatt’s included.
In use
In Zermatt, nearly every path goes up or down:
- “Geischt embrüf oder embri?” – Are you going up or down?
- “Mooru geit är embri uff Visp.” – Tomorrow he’s going down to Visp.
Sources: Schweizerisches Idiotikon, “Auf- und abwärts: Warum ausserhalb des Deutschwallis niemand weiss, wohin embri und embrüf führen” (This Fetzer, 2021); walliserdialekt.ch, “Richtungsadverbien”, after Volmar Schmid, Wir Walser, 1996.