Tue, 9 February 2010
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A Swiss minority fight to preserve their language in a country where French, German and Italian dominate.SAMEDAN - Schoolteacher Andrea Urech admits that he sometimes feels very lonely in his fight to keep alive the Romansh language spoken by less than one percent of people in Switzerland.
"I have written letters to all the hotels here offering my services to translate documents into Romansch, but I didn't get one single answer," he said.
Depending on who you talk to in eastern Switzerland's Graubuenden canton where most Romansh speakers are found, there is either fervent support or strong resistance to the language spoken by only 60,000 people across the country.
For every Urech who says "gea" to Romansh, there is someone else who says "na" or has an anecdote about how Romansh was being saved at an economic cost to the region.
The head of Graubuenden canton's tourism and economic bureau, Eugen Arpagaus, has one such example of an employee who quit because the town where he lives switched from German to Romansh language teaching in school.
"He did not want his children to be taught in Romansh, so he left and I had to find someone else to replace him. We are losing talent because of this.
"Theirs (Romansh proponents') is a romantic view. In reality, the language is a real handicap," he said.
A board member of Engadin St Moritz region's mountain rail, Dieter Bogner, pointed to an example of a Romansh-speaking employee who never fails to make mistakes when writing German even though the latter is the official language at work.
"Romansh speakers may tell you it is not a problem, but it is a problem. I receive CVs sometimes from Romansh speakers who just cannot write in German," said Bogner, highlighting the fact that much of Switzerland's industrial powerhouses are concentrated in German-speaking regions Zurich and Basel.
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