Schweizerdeutsch vs. Hochdeutsch: schmecken oder riechen?

What does “schmöck” mean in Swiss German?

In Standard German, schmecken means “to taste.” In Swiss German, schmecken — pronounced schmöcke, third-person schmöck — means “to smell.” So when a Swiss speaker says es schmöckt fein, they mean it smells nice, not that it tastes good. Standard German speakers hear a compliment about the flavour; Swiss speakers are talking about the aroma. It is one of the most reliable false friends between the two varieties.

The split goes back to Middle High German smęcken, which originally covered both sensing by smell and by taste — the same semantic breadth that English “savour” once had. Standard German narrowed the word to taste; Swiss German (Alemannic) kept the smell meaning. The clip makes the trap vivid: a character says es schmöckt scho so fein while sniffing food, and is immediately told they cannot possibly know how it tastes because they have not tried it yet — a perfect live demonstration of the confusion. The clip ends with the explicit gloss: schmöck bedeutet riechen auf Schweizer (“schmöck means 'to smell' in Swiss German”).