Hello Historians, I am Swiss and recently got interested in history. So my question is, are modern Swiss people Germanic or Celtic in heritage?
At first I thought we are Celtic, because of the Celtic tribe of Helvetians (Helvetii) who settled here and the country is actually called Confoederatio Helvetica, abbreviated as CH. However, after some more reading I found out about the Alemanni (Alemannen), who were a Germanic tribe that settled in north eastern Switzerland and which gave the name of our "language", some might say it's only a dialect, who is called Allemannisch.
So all things considered, would you say the Germanic or Celtic tribes had more impact on what would be considered modern Switzerland and would a Swiss guy like myself be more Germanic or Celtic in heritage?
Not an answer but more of a continuity to OP's question, wouldn't it depend from which region of Switzerland you are? Like french swiss would come from the helvets who are gallic, swiss germans from germanic tribes and swiss italians + romansh would come from the romans?
Neither.
It's simple enough to determine the general relationships of populations through mitochondrial DNA these days, but it is extremely bad history (with a bit of a racialist tinge to boot!) to reify that DNA evidence into an ethnicity or culture, that is, a "tribe". Additionally, when the ancient (Roman) and medieval authors talk about population movements, they tend to see large, coherent groups, because that's cultural baggage the authors themselves carry. Finally, many of these "tribes" were eagerly seized onto by 19th and 20th c. nationalists and reified into ancient origins for that person's nation.
The ur-categories ("Germanic", "Celtic") originally referred to linguistic groups, but they too were appropriated by nationalists. Again, as with DNA, there is very little (read: no) real relationship between these language groups and culture or ethnicity.
So, it's very, very difficult---I would say impossible---to pick apart how the facts we have related to events "on the ground". And the long breadth of time in question means that even if we could say there were such tribes, their cultural contributions would be minimal. The socio-political milieu of what would eventually become France and Germany from the later middle ages onward override everything else.