Switzerland: Managing Multilingualism at the Societal Level

Abstract

Switzerland is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in Western Europe, in which four national languages coexist: German, French, Italian and Romansch. This paper demonstrates how Switzerland has been a successful case of managing a multilingual situation within a modern European state. There have been four main factors as to why Switzerland has managed to prevent conflict and achieve a stable linguistic situation; crosscutting religious and socioeconomic divisions, political recognition of language equality at the federal level, decentralised federalism and cantonal autonomy, and political accommodation and power sharing (Schmid, 2001). However, even if Switzerland has achieved a great degree of linguistic cohesion and stability, some linguistic conflicts have arisen. The most critical period for Swiss linguistic unity was during the 20th century, in which different conflictive episodes between the German Swiss and the French Swiss occurred at a political level, with several cultural and linguistic consequences. Despite some political and linguistic tensions, Switzerland has a strong cultural tradition of moderating social and linguistic conflicts and promoting stability, and the Swiss population as a whole highly value tolerance and mediation.