High Alemannic

The High Alemannic people speak the middle branch of Alemannic German across the Swiss plateau from Zurich and Aargau to Bern, and in Liechtenstein, Vorarlberg, the Markgräflerland and southern Sundgau. Their ancestors were the Alemanni, a Germanic confederation that overran the Roman Agri Decumates by 260 and settled northern Switzerland and the Upper Rhine until Clovis of the Franks defeated them in 496 and absorbed them; their customary law became the Lex Alamannorum around 720.

After the duchy of Swabia collapsed in 1268, Swiss plateau communes built an oath fellowship: the Confederacy of 1291 gathered the forest cantons, and Zurich and Bern had joined by the mid-1300s.

Victory in the Swabian War of 1499 made the confederates de facto independent, confirmed at Westphalia in 1648, while the Reformation split the towns between Zwingli's Protestant Zurich and the Catholic cantons. Their dialects remained the speech of town and countryside, alongside Standard German in church and print.