Swiss culture: a country that named itself in a language nobody speaks

Why Switzerland names itself in a dead language

The English name comes from Schwyz, one of the Waldstätte cantons at the core of the Old Swiss Confederacy. The Swiss began applying it to themselves after the Swabian War of 1499, alongside the older word Eidgenossen, comrades by oath. That is one canton standing in for all the others, which works in a foreign language and settles nothing at home. Internally the country is Schweiz, Suisse, Svizzera and Svizra, and a federal document that has to print one of them has to prefer one region.

The state assembled in 1848 declined to prefer any. Confoederatio Helvetica was neologised in the decades that followed, reaching back past all four languages to the Helvetii, a Gaulish tribe living on the Swiss Plateau before the Roman era, by way of the Napoleonic Helvetic Republic. It went onto the coins in 1879. It was inscribed on the Federal Palace in 1902, and after 1948 it entered the official seal. The abbreviations that fall out of it are the ones the rest of the world uses without knowing what they stand for: CHF for the franc, .ch for the domain, CH on a car, HELVETIA on a stamp. A typeface developed in 1960 took the same adjective.

The device is copied well below the level of the state. Pro Helvetia, Pro Natura, Pro Juventute, Pro Senectute, Pro Infirmis, Pro Patria and Pro Specie Rara are Latin because a foundation working across four language regions cannot be named in one of them without the name becoming an argument. Helvetia herself predates the federal state. She appears as a personification of the confederacy in a play by Johann Caspar Weissenbach in 1672.

How four languages divide the federal administration

German, French and Italian hold equal status as official languages of the federal administration. Romansh is a national language and is official only in dealings with the people who speak it, which is why federal laws do not have to be decreed in it.

In 2020, 62.3% of the population spoke German at home, 22.8% French, 8% Italian and 0.5% Romansh. The regions are contiguous and they touch the countries whose languages they share: German across the east, north and centre and along the border with Germany, French in the west facing France, Italian in the south facing Italy, Romansh in the upper valleys of the Rhine and the Inn. Seventeen cantons have German as their only official language. Fribourg, Bern and Valais are officially bilingual, Grisons is officially trilingual, and its municipalities set their own.

The administration this produces is asymmetric. Debates in the National Council are translated simultaneously between the three official languages. The Council of States translates nothing, and its members are expected to understand at least German and French. Federal employees draft in their own tongue, and 77% of original official documents are written in German against 20% in French and just under 2% in Italian. More than half of the Italian speakers on the federal payroll are translators. The Federal Supreme Court publishes a decision in a single language, usually the one used at the earlier instance, and issues a three-language summary only for the cases treated as leading.

Why the dialects survived in only half the country

The four regions did not treat their own vernaculars alike, and the divergence can be measured.

German-speaking Switzerland kept its dialects and then gained ground with them. Swiss German spread through the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in broadcasting, and it is the ordinary spoken language of the region, while writing is done in Swiss Standard German. In 2016 the language most spoken at home among permanent residents aged fifteen and over was Swiss German, at 59.4%, with Standard German far behind at 10.6%. Walser German, a Highest Alemannic variety carried out of Valais by Walser emigrants, survives as a separate branch of the same stock.

Romandy went the other way. Franco-Provençal, the historical vernacular of most of the French-speaking region, has all but disappeared: at the end of the twentieth century it was still spoken by 6.3% of the population of Valais, 3.9% in Fribourg and 3.1% in Jura, and it is now mostly the speech of older generations. What survives of the difference is vocabulary. Swiss French counts in septante and nonante, and in huitante in Vaud, Valais and Fribourg; a five-centime coin is a sou; the meals of the day are déjeuner, dîner and souper. In Italian Switzerland the Ticinese dialect of Lombard has retreated to family settings and casual talk.

These divergences have a name of their own. About three thousand Helvetisms are recorded in Duden and several hundred in the Petit Larousse, words and constructions that exist in Swiss German or Swiss French and nowhere else.

Romansh was given the opposite treatment, protection by statute. The federal constitution recognised it as a national language in 1938 and the Confederation declared it official in 1996, so a Romansh speaker may write to the federal government and expect an answer in Romansh. The authorities use one standardised form, Romansh Grischun, although the living dialects are several. Speakers remain concentrated in the Surselva, the Albula region and the Engiadina Bassa with Val Müstair.

Why English does the work the national languages cannot

Learning a second national language is compulsory at school, and it has not produced a country that transacts in three. Most Swiss learn English as well, and its advantage is that it belongs to none of the four regions, so conceding to it costs nobody anything. A survey in 2023 found that 6.4% of inhabitants mainly speak English and that 23% of the working population usually use it at work.

It shows in the names. The railways have sold tourism offers under the RailAway label since 1999, and the national sporting bodies call themselves Swiss Olympic and Swiss Super League, their German and French names almost never used. A study of Swiss medical students in 2003 found that they switched to English the moment somebody from another language region joined the conversation, and that the Italian speakers from Ticino were the reason, because the rest rarely understood their messages.

Where the confessional divide still shows on buildings

After the Reformation each canton was either Catholic or Protestant, and the settlement that ended the civil war of 1847 left that arrangement standing. The federal state founded the following year fixed cantonal sovereignty over schools and churches. There is still no national school system and no state religion, and the twenty-six cantons remain the unit that decides both.

Most cantons, with Geneva and Neuchâtel excepted, recognise official churches and finance them by taxing their members, in some places extending the arrangement to the Old Catholic Church and to Jewish congregations. In 2020 the Roman Catholic Church counted 3,048,475 registered members paying church tax, 35.2% of the population, and the Swiss Reformed Church 2,015,816, or 23.3%. A national survey in 2023 put those with no religious affiliation at 33.8%. By 2024 half the population had not attended a religious event in the preceding twelve months.

The most durable trace is architectural. In Catholic central Switzerland the mountain villages carry chapels and statues of saints. In the Protestant Bernese Oberland, where the terrain is much the same, the farmhouses carry Bible verses cut into the housefronts, and heavily carved wooden façades are common there in a way they are not in Catholic districts.

The monastic inheritance reached the UNESCO list twice in the same year, 1983: the Abbey of St Gall, and the Benedictine Convent of St John at Müstair in Grisons. Thirteen Swiss properties are inscribed altogether, nine of them cultural, and the list runs well past religion into the vineyard terraces of Lavaux, added in 2007, and the watchmaking town plans of La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle, added in 2009.

How the Alps became the one thing everybody shared

The mountains were not always the emblem. Scholars including Claude Reichler, Kathleen Kete and Joseph Jung place the change in the middle and later eighteenth century, when the Alps stopped being read by the Swiss as an unattractive and dangerous barrier to be crossed and started being treated as the symbol of the country's beauty. The Gotthard Pass region had been the nucleus of the Confederacy since the early fourteenth century, so the political claim on the Alps was four centuries older than the aesthetic one.

What was built on top of it is a folk culture that is regional in fact and national in billing. Yodelling is not widespread and is confined to certain mountain areas. So is the accordion, which is called the Schwiizerörgeli in a way that claims it for Switzerland against the German Handorgel. The alphorn is a wooden instrument of the trumpet family, used mainly in the mountains and now standing for Swiss music generally. The melodies themselves follow the terrain: wide-ranging and floating in the pastoral areas, more songlike and narrower in the inner and southern Alps, on subjects of love, home, hunting and the nation.

The crafts are domestic in scale. Chip carving decorates milk stools, the neckbands of cowbells, wooden spoons and walking sticks, while figure carving concentrates on Nativity scenes. Embroidery is applied at the points that show, the cuffs and hats and scarves, and it was once a home industry in the north-east and the east; traditional dress has left daily use and the embroidery has followed it into the tourist trade. On autumn evenings in Alemannic Switzerland children carry Räbeliechtli, lanterns hollowed from turnips and cut with suns, moons and stars, hung from three chains and taken through the streets with songs. The custom comes out of harvest thanksgiving in November.

The traditional sports have the same shape. Schwingen, a wrestling form from the rural central cantons, is treated by some as the national sport. Hornussen sits somewhere between baseball and golf. Steinstossen is a stone put practised among the alpine population since prehistoric times and recorded at Basel in the thirteenth century, and it is the centre of the Unspunnenfest, first held in 1805.

What each region eats and drinks separately

A short list of dishes travels under the national name. Fondue, raclette and rösti turn up everywhere. Everything else is regional, shaped by climate and by which language the region speaks, and Zürcher Geschnetzeltes belongs to Zurich and stays there. The dairy is what the Alps produce, and the names say where: Gruyère from the valley of Gruyères, Emmental from the Emmental.

Chocolate has been made in Switzerland since the eighteenth century. The reputation dates from the end of the nineteenth, when conching and tempering raised the quality of what could be made at industrial volume, and solid milk chocolate was invented in 1875 by Daniel Peter.

Wine is the most popular alcoholic drink and the growing is concentrated in Valais, Vaud, Geneva and Ticino, with white a small majority of what is produced. The varieties follow the terroir. Chasselas, called Fendant in Valais, and Pinot Noir cover most of the country, while Merlot dominates in Ticino. Vines have been cultivated here since the Roman era, and the terraced slopes of Lavaux above Lake Geneva were inscribed by UNESCO in 2007. About 82% of the population drinks alcohol regularly, and fine-dining kitchens are concentrated in the west.

Where the international sports bodies are registered

Two levels of sport run in parallel and barely touch. On the first, the mountains produced a winter industry: the bobsleigh was invented at St Moritz, the first world ski championships were held at Mürren in 1931 and St Moritz in 1934, and St Moritz staged the Winter Olympics in 1928 and again in 1948. On the second, the most watched sports are football and ice hockey, the National League fields fourteen clubs, and the country hosted the World Cup in 1954 and shared the European Championship with Austria in 2008. The Ottmar Hitzfeld Stadium plays at 2,000 metres above sea level.

Motorsport went in the opposite direction. Racing was banned after the Le Mans disaster of 1955, with hillclimbing exempted, and Swiss drivers went on competing abroad throughout. The ban was lifted in May 2022 and racing becomes legal again on 1 June 2026, seventy-one years after it stopped.

The permanent institutions are a separate matter from the results. Lausanne is the seat of the International Olympic Committee, its Olympic Museum, the Court of Arbitration for Sport and some fifty-five international sporting associations. FIFA and the International Ice Hockey Federation are both registered in Zurich. Geneva holds the European seat of the United Nations and the headquarters of the Red Cross, which is the same pattern in a different field, and the neutrality that made it possible is treated in the country's own history.

Why so much Swiss art was made elsewhere

Ticino exported architects to Italy for two centuries, which is what an Italian-speaking canton with a building trade and no capital of its own did with them. Antonio da Ponte built the Rialto Bridge and the prisons beside the Doge's Palace in Venice, and Antonio Contino the Bridge of Sighs. Domenico Fontana, who lived from 1543 to 1607, designed the Lateran Palace in Naples together with the façade of St John Lateran and the Royal Palace there. Francesco Borromini built San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and the gallery of the Palazzo Spada; Baldassare Longhena, from Maroggia, built Santa Maria della Salute in Venice. The Gilardi and Oldelli families took the same trade to Russia, where Domenico Gilardi was put in charge of rebuilding Moscow's public buildings, the University among them, after the fire of 1812, and Domenico Trezzini built for Peter the Great in St Petersburg.

The traffic reversed when Europe was at war. Zurich took in the artists who founded Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. Albert Einstein arrived from Germany in 1895 at the age of sixteen, became a Swiss citizen in 1901 and wrote the 1905 papers while living there.

The writers divided by language along with everybody else. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was from Geneva, and Germaine de Staël's house at Coppet was a centre of European literary life in the eighteenth century. Jeremias Gotthelf and Gottfried Keller wrote in German in the nineteenth. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz wrote in French about peasants and mountain dwellers in the twentieth, and Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt were read well outside the borders after the Second World War. Hermann Hesse and Carl Spitteler both took Nobel prizes. Heidi, the story of an orphan girl living with her grandfather in the Alps, became a symbol of the country. Johanna Spyri, who wrote it, lived from 1827 to 1901.

Modern architecture kept the export habit and changed the reputation. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds and studied under Charles l'Eplattenier, who held that the pine tree of the Jura was the right model for local art and built a regional Art Nouveau called the Style Sapin around it. Jeanneret put up his first house, a chalet with pine decoration, at eighteen, and became Le Corbusier. His work was inscribed by UNESCO in 2016. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Basel took the Pritzker Prize in 2001, and Peter Zumthor in 2009.