I have the feeling that we expats tend to think that German is what the Swiss consider their language, perhaps because the written form in official documents is German.

However, it seems in reality each Swiss person outside of Romandie and Ticino feels most at home with their own version of Swiss German.

So I think that although linguistically, you could argue that Swiss German is never more than a dialect that varies upon location (because it does not share a unified written language base), this could be an old fashioned way of defining language.

If the Swiss prefer to speak their own Swiss German, and if the young people write in it, this is effectively their true language, and it may evolve into a more widely adopted written form over the next few decades, you never know.