Swiss speak in different tongues

The census revealed that Switzerland is becoming more multicultural swissinfo.ch

For years English has been touted as Switzerland's fifth national language but the latest census shows this is far from true.

With foreigners now accounting for 20.5 per cent of the population, recent arrivals have brought with them their own mother tongues to throw into the country’s linguistic melting pot.

While German, French and Italian remain top of the heap, English only comes in eighth place behind Serbo-Croat, Albanian, Portuguese and Spanish in a list of the most widely spoken languages.

Romansh, the country’s fourth official language, hardly registers at all, with just 0.4 per cent of the population speaking it.

English

“Many foreigners do not have a very good knowledge of English and after they have been here for a short time, they certainly know one of the national languages better than English,” Ingrid Hove, a linguist at the University of Fribourg, told swissinfo.

Among second generation immigrants, more than three out of five Croats and Portuguese, and nearly 80 per cent of the Spanish, say they use a national language rather than their mother tongue.

Yet despite its inferior position, the importance of English is growing in Switzerland. According to Hove, English has become the lingua franca for the academic world, with many Swiss scientists and academics writing many of their papers in English.

“If English ever becomes a fifth language it will be due to globalisation and will not be due to the people who immigrate and have English as their mother tongue,” she said.

Segondo

Hove states that the increasing diversity has had little noticeable impact on the country’s four national languages. However, she says German-speaking teenagers have developed their own lingo, called “Segondo”, which is a subversion of German, characterised by simplified grammar and a foreign accent.

Segondo’s exact origin is not really clear and it cannot be attributed to one single language. But, according to Hove, it sounds as if an Albanian, Serbo-Croat or Portuguese was speaking German.

“I don’t think it has many words of Portuguese or Serbo-Croat but it sounds different – it sounds foreign,” she said.

However, she does not think that Segondo could ever pose a threat to Swiss-German. “It is very well known that teenagers like to talk differently from adults. So this is just to show that they are different but it disappears again,” Hove explained.

Cultural understanding

Cynthia Meier, a sociologist at the University of Fribourg specialising in migration and racism studies, points out that the increase in the number of immigrants from non-European and Muslim countries has coincided with a shift in the way foreigners are perceived.

Meier, who is originally from Portugal with an Indian background, says there has been a major change in attitude since she first arrived in Switzerland 28 years ago.

“Twenty years ago racism was much more evident than now,” she said. “Nowadays people socialise with foreigners and they are better at understanding other cultures. It is much better now for me than before.”

Non-Europeans now represent 13 per cent of the foreign population, compared with 10 per cent in 1990 and six per cent in 1980. According to the census, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia make up a quarter of the foreign population.

More Muslims

Another interesting statistic is that the number of Muslims living in Switzerland has more than doubled over the past decade and now stands at 310,000.

Jacques Waardenburg, a professor in history and comparative religion at the University of Lausanne, puts this down to the influx of refugees from the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and other asylum seekers from the Muslim world.

“Already in the late seventies, people from the former Yugoslavia were coming to Switzerland, so people knew about the existence of the country and knew they could have refuge here. And the borders were open for them,” he explained.

When Waardenburg, who is originally from Holland, first arrived in Switzerland in 1987, the Muslim community had only just begun to settle down and the building of mosques and Islamic cemeteries was not really accepted.

Nowadays, there are several mosques in big cities such as Zurich, Geneva, Basel and Bern, but Muslims from different countries do not share the same ones for the services, since they speak different languages.

“With the second and third generation, this trend will probably change as the people will be speaking the same language – either German of French,” he said.

by Billi Bierling