The Language Policy in Switzerland
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Hello From the Rest of the World
This hub is an answer to a request formulated as follows:
What are the language pollicies in other countries? Do they require knowledge of more than one language? How many do they speak on average? What are they?
Do you notice that the "reference" country is not even mentionned ? It's always make me smiling to see how some americans see their country as THE country...
That being said, have a look at Switzerland, a small but multi-cultural country, nested between Germany, France, and Italy. (For US readers, this in in Europe, east of your country, accross the Atlantic ;-) )
One Country - Four Languages
Switzerland has something like 6 million inhabitants, and four official languages:
- German
- French
- Italian
- Rumantsch (rather seldom, but still an official language)
Until recent debates, all kids / students did learn a second national language in school, and english later on. The "standard" choice was French for the German speaking, and German for the others.
English Everywhere
In our technological era, english became a must, even in non-technical domains. Some cantons (like states) of Switzerland raised the issue of learning english before a second national language. The debate goes on, and will probably last for years.
Many French speaking Swiss citizen are more fluent in English than in German, so it leads to inter-cultural meetings within switzerland to be held in English. I'm not saying it's good or bad, the most important thing being to continue to live together.
Another example is that the safety briefings aboard Swiss International Airlines are... all in English. Oh my God, it's even in YouTube ! Look at the initial multi-lingual labels, followed by the english-speaking movie.
If you listen till the end, you'll hear a final sentence in German, French, and Italian.
Swiss International Airlines Safety Briefing... in English Only
It's All About ME !
To be a bit selfish, here are my personal language skills:
- French - Native language
- English - What do you reckon ?
- German - My daily working language for the last two months, but I still need to seriously improve it
- Portuguese - Native language of the best half of us (namely my wife), so I can understand some
Not that bad... dude, but despite that, I'm still a daily user of Google Language Tools. They are doing good job with English and French, but German is a bit more complicated, so it's better to use it for isolated words rather than full sentences.
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Comments
Nice hub Rod. Now that English has become the lingua franca of the world, we native speakers are even lazier about learning foreign languages than we used to be. Wouldn't it be great if everyone learned at least one foreign language in school? Your skills,btw, are very impressive.
Seems to me that the Swiss and the Scandinavians are the champs at learning languages and we Americans are the absolute worst. Maybe it is partly because the country is so damned big.... we can travel hundreds of miles in any direction and only run into fellow Americans--no need for another language and no chance to practice one either.
Robie, my skills may seem impressive to you, but I have a couple of friends who can express themselves (not fluently, but for basic, simple things) in up to 10 languages.
French people still regret the good old days where "le français" was the diplomatic language, but it's still the language for cooking... isnt'it ?
Mais oui :-) Everything sounds better in French--especially food --"pommes de terre" sounds so much more appetizing than "potatoes".
So cool, I think I just may do a post on the languages of Nigeria.
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solarshingles says:
6 months ago
Very informative hub! I have a few friends from Switzerland, who speak all these languages plus English. Well, that is certainly not a rule there, but still very, very useful.