s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Agnieszka Stępkowska
rated a distinction between the Confederation’s three official and four national
languages of Switzerland. For practical reasons, Romansh was included in the
latter group to denote the language of political, social and cultural entity. According
to Carol Schmid (2001), the amended language article aimed at three
goals. First, the responsibility for promoting mutual understanding and exchange
between the language communities formally fell on the cantons and the
confederation. Second, the cantons of Grisons and Ticino were made eligible
for special support from the confederation. And third, Romansh was to become
a language of communication between the Romansh-speaking population and
the federal government. In fact, the content of the amendment amounts to
“a declaration in favor of diversity recognizing that special protection is needed
to prevent it [Romansh] dying”, and that “the greatest possible success would be
to maintain its position” (Gillett 1989: 37).
The language situation in the Grisons by no means presents a picture of
proportional shares. According to the 2000 census (Lüdi & Werlen 2005), two
thirds of people living in the Grisons declare German (68,3%) to be their main
language, i.e., a language in which they think and speak best. The other two
language minorities put together make up for a quarter of the canton’s population:
14,5% of Romansh and 10,2% of Italian speakers. As to the Romansh minority,
the census revealed also that half of Romansh speakers lived outside
their language area and nearly a quarter lived outside the Grisons. These numbers
alone are alarming. The numerical superiority of German speaking Swiss
also makes 85% of people use German, or rather Swiss German, in their everyday
life, while Romansh is used only by one fifth (Grünert et al. 2008). This
means that Romansh does not score high as a second language among native
speakers of other Swiss languages. It would be hard to imagine, for instance,
a German speaking Swiss motivated to learn Romansh, unless he had an ethnic
Romansh background. Thus, in most cases, a German, French or Italian Swiss
with a decent knowledge of Romansh would, in all likelihood, have originally
come from the Romansh parts of Switzerland. If this assumption were correct, it
would point to a pending language shift in the Romansh community in Switzerland.
2. Haugen’s cycle of language shift
Language shift is brought about, stimulated or impeded by extra- and intralinguistic
factors. In 1980, Einar Haugen wrote an article entitled “Language
problems and language planning: The Scandinavian model” in which he argued
that this phenomenon was worldwide, and that many social groups were caught
up in what he called the “cycle of language shift”.