Читать книгу Bilingual Couples in Conversation - Silja Ang-Tschachtli - Страница 13

In 2016, Switzerland had a population of about 8.4 million people, 24.9% of whom were foreign nationals (BFS 2017).2 Switzerland is officially a quadrilingual country, with four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. However, Swiss nationals are seldom fluent in all (or even two) of these languages, and many people do not grow up in a bilingual environmentenvironmentlinguistic. Rather, each of the four national languages is spoken within a specific territory which is effectively monolingual (with the exception of a few bilingual areas). In the 2014 survey on the population’s main language(s), 63.3% of the population indicated (Swiss) German, 22.7% French, 8.1% Italian, and 0.5% Romansh as their main language. A total of 22.3% of the population named a non-local language as their main language (or one of their main languages); English was spoken as a main language by 4.6% of the population (BFS 2016a).3 While not all inhabitants use other languages regularly, at least two foreign languages4 are usually learnt at school. Moreover, 38.7% of the adult population indicated in the 2014 census that they regularly use more than one language privately and/or professionally (BFS 2016a).

Even though the majority of the Swiss population may be confined to mainly using one language in their daily lives, it has been noted that being a multilingual country is part of the Swiss national self-image and cultural identityidentitycultural (Stevenson 1997: 22; Murray 2003a: 103). Consequently, it is often argued — especially in political debates — that “the Swiss should be multilingual and able to communicate with each other in their national languages as a way to better mutual understanding” (Murray 2003a: 103). As Rash points out, the acquisition of a second national language is often “seen as central to intercommunal harmony” (2003: 123). At the same time, many Swiss recognize the importance of speaking English well in an international context, which is why second language teachinglanguage teaching is a hotly debated topic. There is disagreement concerning which foreign language should be learnt first in each canton — a national language or English — and at what age these foreign languages should be acquired. In 2004, it was decided that all Swiss students should start learning a second language in third grade, and a third language in fifth grade. One of these languages has to be a national language, but apart from that it is up to each canton to decide which foreign languages their students will learn, and in what order. This new curriculum, the Lehrplan 21Lehrplan 21, has been introduced at schools in most cantons (Lehrplan 21, 2017). As a result, English is currently the first foreign language taught in 16 of the German-speaking cantons. However, some German-speaking cantons do not follow the rule that a third language has to be introduced by the fifth grade, and do not start teaching it until the ninth grade. This recently led federal council member Alain Berset to impose an ultimatum on all cantons, which was front-page news in many Swiss newspapers (e.g. Häfliger and Burri 2016). On the other hand, a popular initiative in the canton of Zurich which aimed to postpone learning one foreign language until secondary school (seventh grade) was rejected by the majority of the voters (60.8%) in May 2017. The fact that there are frequent headlines and political discussions on the topic of second language teaching in schools shows both the controversial nature of the topic and the importance attributed to language learning in Switzerland (see also section 2.4, “English in Switzerland”).