5 ms·

Switzerland seems to have done pretty well with multilingualism over the past few centuries.

by jgwil2 5y ago

brezelgoring 5y ago
I think the comparison is not fair, due to economic, ethnic and historical factors that make Switzerland not a fair metric for any other country to measure up to. If we take just the language, we're comparing (French, Italian, German) against (Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venḓa, Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans). We're comparing the official languages of 3 world powers with very good life prospects for their speakers and those that kinda can do it, against 11 languages that have no value outside of 'talking to grandpa' or being able to read ancient texts. Maybe I'm biased and perhaps I'm coming off a bit racist, that is not my intention. I just want to point out what I'm seeing here.
- keutoi 5y ago
  You could compare it to India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India
  - brezelgoring 5y ago
    I can understand that comparison a bit better, thank you.
BurningFrog 5y ago
Switzerland is a country of valleys separated by mountain ranges. As i understand it, each isolated valley is pretty monolingual.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Switzerland also borders countries using those languages - it seems natural that linguistic borders wouldn't follow political borders especially well.
dgellow 5y ago
We don’t really mix that much though. I’m from the French speaking side, when you live there you basically don’t go to the German or italien speaking side outside of vacations or specific events (also, transports are really expensive, that doesn’t help). And for young people it’s common to speak in English as an intermediate language between regions. I can also say that I had a decade of German courses in school and got absolutely nothing from them. The experience is a bit different if you live in a bilingual canton but people are still mostly speaking one language.

Switzerland seems to have done pretty well with multilingualism over the past few centuries.

by jgwil2 5y ago

Switzerland seems to have done pretty well with multilingualism over the past few centuries.

I think the comparison is not fair, due to economic, ethnic and historical factors that make Switzerland not a fair metric for any other country to measure up to. If we take just the language, we're comparing (French, Italian, German) against (Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venḓa, Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans). We're comparing the official languages of 3 world powers with very good life prospects for their speakers and those that kinda can do it, against 11 languages that have no value outside of 'talking to grandpa' or being able to read ancient texts. Maybe I'm biased and perhaps I'm coming off a bit racist, that is not my intention. I just want to point out what I'm seeing here.

keutoi 5y ago
You could compare it to India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India
- brezelgoring 5y ago
  I can understand that comparison a bit better, thank you.

BurningFrog 5y ago

Switzerland is a country of valleys separated by mountain ranges. As i understand it, each isolated valley is pretty monolingual.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
Switzerland also borders countries using those languages - it seems natural that linguistic borders wouldn't follow political borders especially well.

dgellow 5y ago

We don’t really mix that much though. I’m from the French speaking side, when you live there you basically don’t go to the German or italien speaking side outside of vacations or specific events (also, transports are really expensive, that doesn’t help). And for young people it’s common to speak in English as an intermediate language between regions. I can also say that I had a decade of German courses in school and got absolutely nothing from them. The experience is a bit different if you live in a bilingual canton but people are still mostly speaking one language.