Some Romansh speakers switch to Swiss German just to understand each other
Switzerland's fourth national language has five regional written forms, and speakers from opposite ends of its territory often cannot follow one another at first. Rather than struggle, many simply chat in Swiss German. Romansh survives in the mountain valleys of the Grisons, a direct descendant of the everyday Latin once spoken across the Roman Empire.
By the fifth century, the spoken Latin of the Roman Empire had pushed aside the Celtic and Raetic tongues of the Alps, leaving only a handful of their words behind. Over the following centuries German dialects gradually squeezed the language into its present pocket in the canton of the Grisons. The earliest Romansh writing dates from the tenth or eleventh century, but substantial books appeared only in the sixteenth, when several regional written forms took shape.
Its remote position preserved old features. Like French, it turned the Latin u sound into something closer to ü, so the Latin word for wall became mür or mir. Unlike neighbouring Lombard, it kept an l after consonants, giving clav for key. Centuries of contact with German have shaped its vocabulary far more than Italian has, and the language sits north of the German-Italian linguistic border.
Whether Romansh forms a family with Ladin in the Dolomites and Friulian is an old argument. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli proposed a shared ancestor in 1873, while Carlo Battisti saw only similarities born of isolation. Italian nationalists seized on the second view to call these tongues Italian dialects and to lay claim to the lands where they were spoken, though Romansh speakers have always considered their language distinct.
The dialects form a village-to-village continuum, now broken into separate pieces by spreading German. Sursilvan in the west and the Engadine forms in the east are the two poles; one of those eastern forms is nicknamed Putèr, probably meaning porridge-eaters. A shared standard, Rumantsch Grischun, launched in 1982 and remains divisive. Recognised as a national language since 1938, Romansh was the main language of 40,074 Swiss residents in 2019.
Source: Romansh language
