Not every Swiss person is a polyglot paragon. But the country remains deeply committed to its multilingual model
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskWhich makes it all the odder that, at the heart of Europe, one nation in one state is one of the most happily, successfully multilingual places on Earth. Switzerland, which has a population comparable in size to Hungary’s or Austria’s, has four official languages, and a huge amount of local variety beyond that.
Just over 20% of Swiss speak French, the next-biggest language. Then there is Italian, spoken by only about 8% of the population, and, most remarkably, Romansh, a Romance language that is the native tongue of only around 0.5% of Swiss. Yet all three, alongside German, are official languages in the country. The Italian spoken is often a local variety, and even tiny Romansh has widely diverging dialects.
Traditionally, Swiss students studied the next-biggest national language after their own as their first foreign one. Italian-speakers often learn both German and French . And English is taught in all schools, as well as being heard frequently in the streets of the most international cities, Geneva and Zurich.
And in recent decades, many of the German-speaking cantons, following Zurich, have shaken the Swiss model by introducing English before French as the first foreign language learned in schools. Since even the Swiss do not easily manage three or four languages , this means that many in German-speaking Switzerland do not master French if they focus on English.
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