The four national
languages of Switzerland are
German,
French,
Italian, and
Romansh. Only three of these languages, however, maintain equal status as official languages at the national level within the Federal Administration of the
Swiss Confederation:
German,
French, and
Italian.
Native speakers number about 64 percent (4.6 million) for German (mostly
Swiss German dialects), 20 percent (1.5 million) for French (mostly
Swiss French, but including some
Arpitan dialects), 6.5 percent (0.5 million) for Italian (mostly
Swiss Italian, but including
Lombardic dialects), and less than 0.5 percent (35,000) for Romansh.
The
Swiss German region (
Deutschschweiz) is in the north and center, the
Swiss French part (
Romandie) in the west and the
Swiss Italian area (
Svizzera italiana) in the south. There remains a small
Romansh-speaking native population in
Graubünden in the east. The cantons of
Fribourg,
Bern and
Valais are officially
bilingual; Graubünden is officially
trilingual.
History
The percentage of non-national tongues spoken as a first language in Swiss homes has risen dramatically during the past half century, from less than one percent in 1950 to nine percent in 2000, mostly at the expense of German. The native languages of Swiss residents from 1950 to 2000, in percentages, were as follows:
National languages and linguistic regions
German
The
German-speaking part of Switzerland ( ) comprises about 65 percent of
Switzerland (North Western Switzerland, Eastern Switzerland, Central Switzerland, most of the
Swiss plateau and the greater part of the
Swiss Alps).
In 17 Swiss cantons, German is the only official language (
Aargau,
Appenzell Ausserrhoden,
Appenzell Innerrhoden,
Basel Stadt,
Basel-Landschaft,
Glarus,
Luzern,
Nidwalden,
Obwalden,
Schaffhausen,
Schwyz,
Solothurn,
St. Gallen,
Thurgau,
Uri,
Zug,
Zürich).
In the cantons of
Bern,
Fribourg and
Valais, French is co-official; in the trilingual canton of
Graubünden, more than half of the population speaks German, while the rest speak
Romansh or
Italian. In each case, all languages are
official languages of the respective canton.
While the French-speaking Swiss prefer to call themselves
Romands and their part of the country
la Romandie, the German-speaking Swiss used to refer to (and, colloquially, still do) the French-speaking Swiss as "Welsche", and to their area as
Welschland, which has the same etymology as the English
Welsh. In Germany
Welsch and
Welschland refer to Italy; there, the term is antiquated, rarely used, and somewhat disparaging.
The German-speaking Swiss do not feel very close to their German neighbours to the north (or Austrian neighbours to the east) even though, in the case of Germany, the
Alemannic dialects on both sides of the Rhine are similar. The reasons for this are mainly historical, as the German-speaking part of Switzerland has effectively been culturally and politically separated from the rest of the German-speaking areas since the late Middle Ages and officially since the
Peace of Westphalia. Another factor is the status of the dialect. Standard German is the official language and is used in writing, and to a great part by the media (the vast majority of newspapers and magazines are written in Standard German), but the spoken language in Switzerland in all social classes is almost exclusively one of the
Swiss German dialects.
The German-speaking Swiss do not feel as a uniform group: the average German-speaking Swiss feels foremost belonging to Solothurn, St. Gallen, or Uri, and sees himself not speaking Swiss German, but the Baseldytsch (dialect of Basel), Bärndütsch (dialect of Bern) or Züridütsch (dialect of Zurich). The marked
subsidiarity of the Swiss
federalism, where many political decisions are taken at municipal or cantonal level, supports this attitude.
By the
Middle Ages there had developed a marked difference between the rural cantons of the German-speaking part of Switzerland and the city cantons, divided by views about trade and commerce. After the
Reformation, all cantons were either Catholic or Protestant and the denominational influences on culture added to the differences. Even today, where all cantons are somewhat denominationally mixed, the different historical denominations can be seen in the mountain villages, where Roman Catholic Central Switzerland abounds with chapels and statues of saints, and the farm houses in the very similar landscape of the Protestant Bernese Oberland show Bible verses carved on the housefronts instead.
French
The French-speaking part of Switzerland is shown in green on this map.
(, ,) is the French-speaking part of
Switzerland. It covers the area of the
cantons of
Geneva,
Vaud,
Neuchâtel, and
Jura as well as the French-speaking parts of the cantons of
Bern,
Valais, and
Fribourg. About 1.5 million people (or 20 percent of the Swiss population) live in Romandy.
Standard
Swiss French and the French of
France are the same language, with some differences. For example, like some other regions of the French-speaking world, Swiss people (as well as many Francophone Belgians) use
septante (seventy) instead of
soixante-dix (literally, "sixty ten") and
nonante (ninety) instead of "quatre-vingt-dix" ("four twenties and ten"). In the cantons of
Vaud,
Valais and
Fribourg, speakers use
huitante (eighty) instead of the
Standard French "quatre-vingts" (four twenties). "Sou" is used throughout Romandy for a 5-centime coin, as is "tune" (or "thune") when referring to a 5-Swiss-franc piece.
Historically, the vernacular language used by inhabitants of most parts of Romandy was
Francoprovençal. Francoprovençal (also called
Arpitan) is a language sometimes considered to be halfway between the
langue d'oïl (the historical language of northern France and ancestor of French) and Occitan (the
langue d'oc, spoken in southern France). Standard French and Francoprovençal/Arpitan, linguistically, are distinct and mutual intelligibility is limited. Increasingly, Francoprovençal/Arpitan is used only by members of the older generations.
The term
Romandy does not formally exist in the political system, but is used to distinguish and unify the French-speaking population of Switzerland. The
television channel
Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR) serves the
Romande community across Switzerland, is syndicated to
TV5, and
CanalSat Romande on
October 2.
Italian
thumb|right|250px|A map showing the Italian-speaking areas of Switzerland: darker areas indicate where Italian is most prominentItalian Switzerland (, , ) is the Italian-speaking part of
Switzerland, which includes the Canton of
Ticino and
the southern part of Graubünden. Italian is also spoken in the
Gondo Valley (leading to the
Simplon Pass, on the southern part of the watershed) in Valais.
The linguistic region covers an area approximately 3,500 km² and has a total population of around 350,000 inhabitants, with the number of Italophones residing in Switzerland being 470,000.
According to statistics, the percentage of Italian-speaking Swiss has been rapidly decreasing since the 1970s, after reaching an all-time record of 12 percent of the population during the same decade; however this is entirely because of the reduced number of immigrants from Italy in the country: the percentage of native Italian-speaking Swiss has been steady at 4 percent since the 1950s.
Romansh
Distribution of Romansh in the canton
Graubünden (2000).
On the cantonal level,
Romansh is an official language only in the trilingual canton of Graubünden, where the municipalities in turn are free to specify their own official languages.
Significant communities of Romansh speakers remain in the
Surselva, the
Oberhalbstein valley, the lower
Engadin and the
Val Müstair.
Romansh has been recognized as one of four "national languages" by the
Swiss Federal Constitution since 1938. It was also declared an "official language" of the Confederation in 1996, meaning that Romansh speakers may use their language for correspondence with the federal government and expect to receive a Romansh response – in Romansh Grischun, because the federal authorities use the standardized language exclusively.
Immigrant languages
Top 10 languages
The non-official language with the largest group of native speakers is
Serbo-Croatian with 103,000 speakers in
2000, followed by
Albanian (95,000),
Portuguese (89,500),
Spanish (77,500),
English (73,000), and
Turkish (44,500). Speakers of all other non-official languages totaled 173,000. Altogether, roughly 10 percent of the population has a native language other than the four official languages.
See also
- Röstigraben, referring to the asserted difference in mentality between Swiss Germans and the French-speaking Romands
