Switzerland Culture & Language

Swiss culture is regional before it is national, and the person who tells you so will be doing it in one of four languages.

Four languages, unevenly

German is spoken by about sixty-two per cent, French by twenty-three, Italian by eight, and Romansh — a Rhaeto-Romance language surviving in Graubünden — by well under one per cent. Swiss German is a group of dialects used in speech at every level of society, with standard German kept for writing; the gap is wide enough that Germans watching Swiss television are given subtitles.

The alpine year

The Alpabzug in September, when cattle come down from the high pastures wearing flowers and enormous bells, is a real working event that has become a spectacle. Yodelling, alphorns, Swiss wrestling and stone-throwing meet every three years at the Eidgenössisches, which fills a temporary arena of fifty thousand people.

Cheese and chocolate as industry

Gruyère, Emmental, Appenzeller and raclette are protected and regionally specific, and fondue is a genuine winter meal rather than a tourist invention. Milk chocolate was developed here in the nineteenth century when Daniel Peter worked out how to combine cocoa with Henri Nestlé’s condensed milk.

Precision as a value

Watchmaking in the Jura, pharmaceuticals in Basel, machine tools in the east, and a rail network whose punctuality is published monthly. The cultural point is not the products but the attitude to them.

Art and letters

Paul Klee and Alberto Giacometti, the Dada movement founded at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in postwar writing, and the Montreux Jazz Festival each July.

Switzerland has four national languages. German is spoken in the centre, north and east; French in the west; Italian in Ticino and part of Graubünden; and Romansh by a small number of people in Graubünden alone.

What is spoken in the German-speaking part is Swiss German, a group of dialects sufficiently distinct that German visitors often struggle. Standard German is used in writing, on signs and in news broadcasts, and everyone can switch to it — but it is a second register rather than a mother tongue, and the Swiss are aware of it.

English is very widely spoken, particularly in cities, tourism and business, and a visitor will rarely be stuck.

Cross the language border and the greeting changes with it: Grüezi in the German-speaking cantons, bonjour in the French, buongiorno in Ticino. Using the right one is noticed and appreciated. On mountain paths, greeting everyone you pass is standard and not optional.