The article focuses on word-formation models of nominal and verbal lexemes of Swiss version of the German language in the comparative aspect with semantically equivalent lexemes of the German language. The aim of the study is to show that variability of the German language is manifested at all language levels, including the level of word formation. The basic theoretical provisions are fundamental developments of the representatives of classical Germanic studies and modern scientists, devoted to the problems of the language variability, linguistic description of the national specifics of the German literary language, terminological and methodological aspects of the pluricentric theory, peculiarities of the German language functioning in Switzerland, comparative aspects of the study of word-formation models of national variants of the German language. The status of the word formation theory among other linguistic disciplines is separately discussed. Papers under the letters I and N are used as an empirical material of the study of the nominal and verbal lexemes of the variability Dictionary of the German language of 2004 («Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen»). The corpus of the language material obtained by the method of continuous sampling is structured in accordance with the categorical and grammatical characteristics of the lexemes and described in the comparative aspect by the selected word-formation models for each part of speech. The article contains results of the quantitative and qualitative processing of the language corpus. Firstly, the frequency cases of lexical coincidencefound in the components of the second composite of nominal parts of speech are discussed in Swiss German and the German language spoken in Germany. Secondly, more rare cases of variation of both composite components are recorded. For verbal lexemes a tendency to constancy and variability is not so obvious because of a low frequency of the verbal lexemes in the sample of the linguistic material. Thirdly, we provide examples of the culture-specific vocabulary denoting realities peculiar to Swiss culture. A promising direction of the study is a discussion of manifestations of the variability found in the German language in connection with the concept of the language personality. The anthropo-oriented and discursive approaches prevailing in modern linguistics make it possible to consider the pluricentric language as a pragmatic space for (self-)identification of the language personality