2024-03-26 10:38:00
First of all, a development that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago: French is definitively shunned by the majority of Swiss German cantons. Appenzell Innerrhoden got the ball rolling at the turn of the 2000s, followed shortly following by Zurich, by establishing English as the first foreign language ahead of French. The decision was controversial, but most of the other German-speaking cantons ended up following suit: Shakespeare before Molière.
The conclusion is that we can kindly forget the illusion of a confederal dialogue in French. National cohesion now only relies on standard German. And this is where a second problem arises: Swiss German is everywhere.
The revival of Swiss German
The dialect indeed arouses powerful support across Sarine. The national councilor of St. Gallen, Lukas Reimann, a lawyer by profession, even tried to introduce it as a language of debate in Parliament. “Not only is the dialect favored by young people and social networks, but it is experiencing a real renaissance”explains the elected UDC in his motion.
The debates at the National, on May 2, 2023, were an anthology moment, which deserves to be watched! Lukas Reimann makes a fool of himself by trying to respond in French to the acidic interventions of his French-speaking colleagues. The question asked in Italian by Fabio Rigazzi remains unanswered. The summit was reached when the Valais national councilor Philipp Bregy declaimed a poem in Upper Valais, incomprehensible to all the councilors except him: “Fascht üsser Atu heintsch alli glosut”… The illustration of the fact that Swiss German is not a unique language. (The motion was soundly defeated.)
The impossible no one is bound
This confrontation with Swiss German and its local domination poses a problem for the French-speaking and Ticino residents, who have the feeling of having learned standard German for nothing. The integration of the foreign population living in Switzerland is also difficult: should they learn standard German or the local dialect? Maybe both, and quickly please?
What should we French-speaking people do? Fighting to maintain the practice of standard German in a professional environment, at least in the presence of Latins? Or adopt the Vaudois variant: learn not only standard German at school, but also Swiss German? After electing a German-speaking Swiss woman to the government, this canton, which was a colony of the canton of Bern for centuries, has decidedly behaved strangely, to say the least.
Or should we drop German in French-speaking schools in favor of English? I don’t know…
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