Everything about Romandie totally explained
| immigrant =
Serbo-Croatian,
Albanian,
Portuguese,
Spanish,
English,
Turkish
| foreign =
English
| sign =
Langage gestuelle,
Deutschschweizer Gebärdensprache
| keyboard =
QWERTZ
| keyboard image =
}}
The
linguistic geography of Switzerland is on the main tripartite, with the
Swiss German region (
Deutschschweiz) in the northeast, the
Swiss French part (
Romandie) in the west and the
Swiss Italian Ticino in the south. There remains a small
Romansh speaking minority in the
Grisons.
The four official languages of Switzerland are
German,
French,
Italian and
Romansh.
Native speakers number about 64% (4.6 million) for German (mostly
Swiss German dialects), 20% (1.5 million, mostly
Swiss French, but including some
Arpitan dialects) for French, 7% (0.5 million, mostly
Swiss Italian, but including
Lombardic dialects) for Italian and less than 0.5% (35,000) for
Romansh.
The Cantons of
Fribourg,
Berne,
Valais and
Grisons are officially bi- or trilingual (Grisons). In fact,
Jura and
Ticino are also bilingual, but the traditional German minority is very small.
History
Development of linguistic demographics in Switzerland since 1950 according to official census data:
| year |
German |
French |
Italian |
Romansh |
other |
| 1990 |
63,6 |
19,2 |
7,6 |
0,6 |
8,9 |
| 1970 |
64,9 |
18,1 |
11,9 |
0,8 |
4,3 |
| 1950 |
72,1 |
20,3 |
5,9 |
1,0 |
0,7 |
German
German speaking part of Switzerland ( ) comprises about 65% of
Switzerland (North Western Switzerland, Eastern Switzerland, Central Switzerland, most of the
Swiss plateau and the greater part of the
Swiss Alps).
In most Swiss cantons, German is the only official language (
Aargau,
Appenzell,
Basel,
Glarus,
Lucerne,
Nidwalden,
Obwalden,
Schaffhausen,
Schwyz,
Solothurn,
St. Gallen,
Thurgau,
Uri,
Zug,
Zurich).
The canton of
Bern has a French minority, while in
Fribourg and
Valais, German has minority status. In the canton of
Graubünden, more than half of the population speaks German, while the rest speak
Italian and
Romansh. 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 . In Germany
Welsch and
Welschland refer to Italy; there, the term is antiquated, rarely used, and somewhat disparaging.
In contrast to the Italian- and French-speaking Swiss, the German-speaking Swiss don't feel very close to their German neighbours in 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 part of Switzerland has factually been 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, but the spoken language in Switzerland in all social classes is almost exclusively
Swiss German (more precisely one of the Swiss German dialects) - in Germany, people with higher education seldom speak a marked dialect.
The German-speaking Swiss don't 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.
The German-speaking part of Switzerland has no single culture. In the
Middle Ages already there was a marked difference between the rural cantons and the city cantons focusing on 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 the 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
Romandy () 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
Berne,
Valais, and
Fribourg. About 1.5 million people (or 20% 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 much of Romandy, speakers use
huitante (eighty) in place of the standard in France and elsewhere of "quatre-vingt" (four-twenty) and "sou" for a 5-centime coin.
Historically, the vernacular language used by inhabitants of most parts of Romandy was
Francoprovençal. Francoprovençal (also called Arpetan or Arpitan) is a French variant sometimes considered halfway between Standard French (
langue d'oïl, originally spoken in northern France) and Provençal (
langue d'oc, spoken in southern France). Standard French and Francoprovençal/Arpetan, linguistically, are distinct and mutual intelligibility is limited. Increasingly, Francoprovençal/Arpetan is used only by members of the older generations.
The term
Romandy doesn't 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
Italian Switzerland ( ) is the Italian-speaking part of
Switzerland, which includes the Canton of
Ticino and the valleys of
Mesolcina, Calanca,
Bregaglia and
Poschiavo in
Graubünden. It is sometimes referred to as
La Terza Svizzera, or 'Third Switzerland', due to
Italian being the third most spoken language in the country.
The linguistic region covers an area approximately 3,500km² and has a total population of around 400,000 inhabitants, 80,000 of which are foreign nationals.
The most important towns in Italian Switzerland are in
Ticino and are:
In 1996 the region established its first university, the
Università della Svizzera italiana, which is based in Lugano and
Mendrisio. The region's international airport is located in
Agno.
Romansh
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 Romansh idiom for correspondence with the federal government and expect to receive a Romansh response – in Romansh Grischun, because the federal authorities use the standardized idiom exclusively.
Image:Amtssprachen GR 1860.png| official languages in 1860
Image:Amtssprachen GR 2000.png| official languages in 2000
Image:Sprachen GR 2000.png| actual distribution in 2000
Immigrant languages
The non-official language with the largest group of native speakers is
Serbo-Croatian with 103,000 speakers in
2000, followed by
Albanian with 95,000,
Portuguese with 89,500,
Spanish with 77,500,
English with 73,000,
Turkish 44,500, and a total of 173,000 speakers of other languages, amounting to roughly 10% of the population with a native language not among the four official languages.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Romandie'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://linguistic_geography_of_switzerland.totallyexplained.com">Linguistic geography of Switzerland Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
