Tourism brings great changes. Two Swiss communities are now officially changing the language.
St. Moritz – Not far from the Swiss luxury ski resort of St. Moritz lies the small community of Surses. Together with the nearby municipality of Muntogna da Schons, this is now making headlines in Switzerland: Because the municipalities are officially changing the language – or have already done so.
Swiss Alpine communities now officially speak German
This emerges from a report by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. Accordingly, Surses and Muntogna da Schons are now part of German Switzerland. So far they have been assigned to the Rhaeto-Romanic language area of Switzerland. This was also the case in the last survey in 2017.
However, this is not because fewer people speak Romansh. The Federal Office explicitly points this out in its report: “The number of Romansh speakers has been almost stable for decades at just over 40,000 people. Around 40 percent of them live in the Romansh area (60 percent in the canton of Graubünden).”
Alpine communities are changing languages because of tourism – an ongoing trend
Rather, the office justifies the shift with the expanding tourism. The number of German-speaking people in the traditional Rhaeto-Romanic communities in Graubünden has been increasing “since the counts began in the tourist communities”. For example, the tourist resorts in the Upper Engadin switched from Rhaeto-Romanic to German-speaking Switzerland as early as 1888 and the communities in Domleschg around 1900.
This process therefore intensified in the 20th century. In the 21st century, however, the language areas remained stable until 2017. But now the process is apparently continuing: “With Surses and Muntogna da Schons, two other tourist communities are now moving to the German-speaking area,” says the statement.
If the Surses community doesn’t mean anything to you: It was only founded in 2016 as a merger of the former communities of Savognin, Salouf, Bivio, Cunter, Riom-Parsonz, Mulegns, Tinizong-Rona, Sur and Marmorera.
Lake Zug in Switzerland is currently making headlines: it turned blood red.
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