The cabinet has decided that the nation’s languages should be represented proportionately within the federal administration.
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With that in mind, language quotas will be introduced, the government announced on Friday.
The goal is that 70 per cent of government employees be German-speaking, 22 per cent French-speaking, seven per cent Italian-speaking and one per cent Romansh-speaking.
In order to support the linguistic minorities, the government has established a delegate for multilingualism. In addition, the ministries will hire additional translators.
The government also wants managers to be fluent in a second language and to have a working knowledge of a third one.
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Even in parliament, many members struggle to follow what their colleagues from other language regions are saying. Radical party member Ruedi Noser tells swissinfo.ch about the reasons for his decision to spend a year in the French part of the country. Noser sits in the House of Representatives for the centre-right party. An engineer by…
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On the occasion of International Mother Language Day on Sunday, swissinfo.ch spoke to Jean-Marie Annoni, of the neuropsychology unit at the Geneva University Hospital, who has been working on the subject of language acquisition for several years. Switzerland has four national languages – German, French, Italian and Romansh – so multilingual ability is not unusual.…
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That is one of the key findings of a National Science Foundation study looking at political debates on language issues over the past five decades. From the 1960s until the 1990s, discussions in parliament focussed on ensuring equality among the official languages, German, French, Italian and Romansh, as well as dialogue between the language groups.…
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