DO YOU text buttoned-up, or dressed down? If you're like most people, chances are you text quickly, in informal language, mostly to people you are friendly with. So it's no surprise that two articles have come out recently on how strongly people prefer to text in the language most comfortable to them. Strikingly, the two come from totally different societies.

Last month, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported on what is by now a standard feature of life in German-speaking Switzerland: texting in dialect (Schwiizerdütsch). Spoken German in Switzerland is so distant from standard High German that Germans cannot understand it. Swiss-Germans learn High German in school, and use it for most writing, formal speeches and the like. But the language of home, the streets, friendship and intimacy is dialect. Some cantons and cities have even banned High German from pre-school teaching by referendum. With this kind of pride in the dialect, it's little surprise that Schwiizerdütsch has become the language of text messages sent by the young. (Their parents, apparently, still tend to reply in High German.) One wrinkle is that there is no single standard form of Schwiizerdütsch—the dialect can vary quite a bit from valley to valley. But the Neue Zürcher Zeitung hints that text-messaging is leading to a certain amount of standardisation. Though no one individual or group gets to determine what is "correct dialect", some order is emerging spontaneously.

That people want to text in the language closest to the heart is shown by another story. Leo Mirani, an occasional Johnson contributor, writes in Quartz that Indians text far less than people in similar countries. Why? Partly because existing operating systems and keyboards make it cumbersome to do so in Indian languages, he argues. Though many Indians speak English, vastly more do not. And Indians, like the Swiss, usually prefer their first language in any case. So a few clever entrepreneurs are devising better input systems for some of India's many languages, with the hope of getting Indians as hooked on texting as they are on talking. (This makes business sense too. Profit margins for voice calls are razor-thin in India.)

Renato Beninatto of Moravia, a translation and localisation company, is obviously pleased by phenomena like this. I asked him in a recent meeting why, for example, a shampoo company would pay to have the instructions on its Dutch products translated into Dutch, when a) nearly all Dutch people read English, and b) no one needs to be told how to use shampoo. He answered at least the first half of my question by explaining what he called the "underwear effect". Wearing a suit, people don't mind using formal language, including a foreign one. The closer they get to intimate life—the closer they get to their underwear, that is—the more they want to use their mother tongue.

(Switzerland article via Barrie England of Real Grammar.)