Two newspapers in a café in Fribourg – a city where two official languages are used
According to Swissinfo.ch, about one in five Swiss uses three languages at least once a week, and 7% use as many as four: to speak, write, listen to the radio, watch television, read, or search for something on the Internet. At the top of the platform of the most frequently used languages are German, the Swiss dialect of German, and French. English ranks fourth. This became known thanks to a large-scale survey on languages, religion, and culture in 2014, conducted by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO).
Holders of higher education degrees (76%), young people aged 15-24 (79%), professionally active Swiss (72%), and immigrants and their children known as “secondos” (84%) are those who most often use several languages, the statisticians note. Only a third (36%) of Switzerland's population speaks only one language in their everyday and working life.
Among Swiss who have left their linguistic region, one in five who settled in the German-speaking part regularly uses the language of Molière, and almost one in ten (12%) uses the language of Dante. Similar proportions apply to those who settled in western French-speaking Switzerland with regard to German (19%) and Italian (11%). Conversely, people from this area find it difficult to switch to the dialect after moving to another part of the country: only 6% speak the Swiss variant of German at least once a week.
However, the Ticinese, who are a linguistic minority, are true champions when it comes to frequent use of national languages other than Italian. More than a quarter (28%) easily switch to French, more than a third (34%) to German, and 12% also speak a dialect.
As an international language, English is also regularly used on Swiss soil. In the German-speaking part, 43% of people regularly use it, along with 38% of the French-speaking population and 30% of residents of Ticino. Shakespeare's language has taken precedence over French and Italian in the German-speaking part of the country. The same is true in western Switzerland, where it far surpasses German and Italian in popularity. Only in the Italian-speaking region is it still used less frequently than the national languages.
A common trait among all Swiss residents is that young people (63%) and those with higher education (62%) most often switch to English. However, this does not mean that English has gained priority over national languages: its use may be limited to reading or passive listening at least once a week, such as when browsing the internet or listening to music, and in some professions, passive English is sufficient.
The native language of many immigrants, Italian, has become the most widely spoken foreign language in Switzerland. It is followed by Spanish (6%), Portuguese (5%), and the languages of the Balkan countries – Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian – (together 3%).
French-speaking cantons have become a new home for people from Spanish-speaking countries and those who speak Portuguese. There are fewer of them in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, which, on the other hand, is more often chosen by people from the Balkan nations.
The survey on languages, religion, and culture is part of the federal population census. It was first conducted in 2014 and will be repeated every five years. It surveyed about 16,500 people who have been permanently resident in Switzerland for at least 15 years.