The Swiss are a nation by choice, not by language or ethnicity
Switzerland has no single Swiss ethnicity or shared mother tongue. German, French, Italian and Romansh speakers make up its citizenry, bound together as a Willensnation, a nation of will. Even the English word Swiss traces back to a single place name, Schwyz, and the number of citizens has multiplied roughly fivefold since 1815.
The country's communities share language, ethnicity and religion less with each other than with the big European powers around them, so domestic pluralism paired with neutrality became a matter of survival. Instead of imposing one national language, nineteenth-century elites built a civic nation around democratic institutions and common political ritual, while loyalty stayed with the cantons. C. G. Jung likened the result to a chronic state of mitigated civil war. Federal sharpshooting contests and a national holiday introduced in 1889 were enlisted to nurture a pan-Swiss identity.
German speakers, including immigrants from Germany and Austria, made up 62.3 percent of the population in 2020, mostly using Alemannic dialects. French-speaking Romands accounted for 22.8 percent, Italian speakers 8 percent and Romansh speakers about 0.5 percent. The original Eight Cantons all spoke Alemannic, but Bern and Uri took French-speaking Vaud and Italian-speaking Ticino as subject lands from the 15th century, and Geneva, Neuchâtel and parts of Valais and the Jura joined in 1815. Romansh became a national language in 1938 as a rebuff to fascist Italian irredentism.
Citizenship still runs through the cantons. No Swiss passports existed before 1915; people carried cantonal ones instead. Under the 1999 constitution, anyone who is a citizen of a commune and its canton is Swiss, and identity documents record an inherited place of origin rather than a birthplace. Only since 2013 has a woman stopped taking on her husband's place of origin when she marries.
From 1.7 million in 1815, the count of Swiss nationals reached 8.7 million by 2020, of whom over 1.5 million also hold another nationality, and about 11 percent live abroad, most of them in the European Union. By 2011, 37 percent of residents had an immigrant background.
Source: Swiss people
