Are there writing rules for Swiss German? Or do people just write the way they want?

In General

There are no strict rules about how to write Swiss German, so there isn’t really a right or wrong. There are just some guidelines about it being either phonetic (written like you would pronounce it) or close to German writing. As Swiss German is a dialect of German, it makes sense to write words similarly.

Guidelines

A good guideline about how to write words in Bernese Swiss German can be found here – Bärndütsch schrybe – Schriftschprach nach, Nach Ruth Bietenhard, Werner Marti. The article is written in German. They suggest to write words similar to the German writing. As there are words that sound similar, they suggest writing them in a particular way so that they can be distinguished, for example “Rys” (rice) and “Riis” (giant).

Usage in practice

As there are no strict rules, you will see different styles of writing. I myself for example write differently than my brother, my mum or my friends. We all have some words or patterns in the writing that are different. And we do understand each others writing very easily. But for a language learner it can be confusing at first, as you pay attention to the smallest details. A friend of mine is always using “ig” for “I”, whereas I always just write “i”. Another friend is using a lot of “ä”, for example “zämä” (together), “ässä” (to eat), whereas I would write “zäme” or “ässe”. Also, I usually write nouns starting with a capital letter like in German, but if I’m in a hurry, I will just write everything in lowercase letters.

You can see that there are many styles of writing that are all possible, right and widely used. This makes it complicated at first but once you got used to these different ways of writing, you will understand all of them. I also find this the beauty of Swiss German – for a country where there are many rules and things are well organized to have a language that is not at all like that.