Comment by Pooge 11 hours ago
> And most people speak (or at least understand) English.
This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.
> Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
We learn the other's respective language for 7 years, too. Yet, as you pointed out, people speak in English because there is no willingness to learn and apply the other's language.
Some of my friends speak English fluently, but I have a very hard bias as I work in IT. My whole family doesn't speak any language other than French. Most of the people I've been to school with don't come close to speaking English casually. None would watch an English content creator.
Due to the shared heritage between the English and German languages, perhaps it's different in the German-speaking region. If you ask someone slightly complicated English questions, they might not be completely lost - after all, some words share the same etymology. But Switzerland is absolutely not an English-speaking country at all.
No, I wouldn't say it's an English-speaking country either. No one talks in English to their peers that are from the same language region.
But yes, I can mostly speak of the German-speaking part. People generally have little problems switching to English, and are used to speaking as well.
This is just a feeling, and I am still speaking for the German part only, but I think age matters less than urban/rural.
Many older people I know have no problems communicating in English when they‘re abroad.
Would be interesting to have the BFS statistics split by age group and region as well…
I met plenty of people in Lausanne who didn't speak English, or at least didn't want to speak English (it is hard to tell, and anyways, it doesn't really matter). I visited Montreal shortly after my 2 year stay in Lausanne ended and I was surprised on how multi-lingual people were there.
Montreal is not representative of Quebec in general. Montreal itself is very multilingual and anglophone depending on what specific part you're in. In the very touristy parts of Montreal you won't even notice French "requirements". Leave the island of Montreal towards the rest of Quebec (i.e. not towards Ontario) and you will find less and less people willing or able to speak English very very quickly.
Until they think you're a tourist. If they hear you speak another language than English and you seem like you're a tourist, then almost every Quebecer will try his best to speak English even if it means using hand and feet to communicate.
But if they think even for a second that you're actually Canadian, then outside Montreal and even in some parts of Montreal you will be met with the full force of Quebecois pride and nationalism and you better speak French to them.
Lausanne is also not representative of Switzerland and is pretty touristy, although I guess Geneva is even more so.
Y'all are both claiming that the major cities in their region are not representative because they are touristy? That's going to apply to most major cities. Tokyo not representative of Japan, New York not representative of USA, Dublin not representative of Ireland, etc.. But they are.
But they aren't representative to some degree.
You definitely won't get 'Southern Charm' or small town feel in NYC. Of course, trying to nail down what exactly is American is gonna be hard to do.
I would definitely not say that if you go to Tokyo you can get the Japanese experience. You get some of it, of course but to say you can get a grasp or even a handful of understanding without ever seeing rice fields and gardens interspersed with houses, beaches with people fishing and immediately turning the catch into sashimi, towns where nothing new has been built since the bubble...
You can't see and feel that in the hustle and bustle, where everyone moves to get away from having neighbors who know all about you, where night is erased by the neon glow.
Well, it makes sense. Canada still has a significant English-speaking majority. Even if Québec in isolation has a French-speaking majority, there's a very large incentive for French-speaking citizens to learn English because their province is surrounded by primarily Anglophone regions.
There are also other factors at play. Montréal has a fairly large community of native English speakers and receives a lot of tourism from Anglophone Canada and the United States due to its status as the largest city in Québec (and second largest in Canada). It also gets a lot of immigrants, many of which are (at least initially) more proficient in English than in French.
I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English. It also doesn't border any English-speaking countries. It seems English is mostly used as a lingua franca for communication between citizens who don't otherwise share a language rather than due to the direct presence of native Anglophones. Also, Romansh aside, all national languages of Switzerland (French, German and Italian) are spoken in areas that directly border a country where that language is the national language (France, Italy, Germany/Austria). With Switzerland being in the Schengen Area, its linguistic regions may be considered to be part of a much larger individual linguistic communities, which I feel may also diminish the need to learn other languages.
> I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English.
The language of French Switzerland is French. You'll never hear German, Italian, or Romansch. If you only spoke German and not French or English, you really couldn't live there very effectively (only places like Bern or Basel are truly multi-lingual), yes you'll get your official docs in German but then what? I assume the same is true in German speaking Switzerland, and I have no idea about Italian Switzerland.
If a Swiss German and Swiss French met for coffee, what language do you think they would wind up speaking? Perhaps English if neither had comfortable fluency in the other language. Not to take away from your point, but English can get you really far in this world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German
> Swiss German (Standard German: Schweizerdeutsch, Alemannic German: Schwiizerdütsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch Mundart, and others; Romansh: Svizzers Tudestg) is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and in some Alpine communities in Northern Italy bordering Switzerland.
All Swiss-German is an Alemannic dialect, not all Alemannic dialects are Swiss-German, is how I'd interpret that.
Probably making a distinction between high german and swiss german.
That doesn‘t match my experience.
About 40% of all Swiss inhabitants speak English at least once a week [1].
Anecdotally, I can't think of a single acquaintance younger than 50 years old that doesn't speak fluently. Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
Some of my German speaking friends even talk in English to French speaking people, even when both have learned the other‘s respective language at school.
[1]: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun...