SWISS LANGUAGES

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 April 1938, Page 3

SWISS LANGUAGES

FOURTH ONE RECOGNISED By 572,129 votes to 52,267 the Swiss people have decided to recognise RactoRoriiance as a fourth national language. 4 . , The vote does not involve a fourth official language in Switzerland, in addition to German, French and Italian. It. does not, for example, mean that Raeto-Romance will have to be printed on bank notes or on all official documents. ' It means simply that the Raeto-Ko-mance language will be granted the official protection of the Federal Government, that its use will be sanctioned in courts of law, and in the translation of laws, Federal and Cantonal, and that certain subsidies which are now available for the spread of education and culture in the three official languages will be. in due proportion, made available for Raeto-Romance. More could hardly be expected. No more thaji 1.1 per cent, of the population of Switzerland (about 44,000) actually use Raeto-Romance as their native language, as against 71.9 per cent, speaking German, 20.4 per cent. French, and 6 per cent. Italian. But Raeto-Romance is not a dialect, least of all is it, as is sometimes wrong; ly claimed, an Italian patois. Nearer akin, perhaps, to Catalan than to any other direct descendant of the spoken Latin tongue, it is a language in its own right, deriving from the current speech of the Roman legions, in particular those of Augustus, which, notably in 15 8.C., under the command of Drusus and Tiberius, brought the Roman peace to the Eastern Swiss Alps and laid the foundations of the Roman Province of Raetia.

It was mainly owing to these by no means easy campaigns in what is now the Engadine that the Imperial frontier assumed what is for us the familiar contours of the Rhine and the Danube. The “push,” which was accompanied by merciless massacres of the male population, was continued by successive Roman armies until the line o.f the Danube was at last and for centuries the frontier of the Roman Empire. Of what was once Roman Raetia, and of the people which spoke the Ract'oRoniance of the Roman legions, a bare fragment remains in what is now Switzerland. In mountain valleys stretching roughly from Disentis in the west to Schuls-Tarasp and the Samnaunthal on the Swiss-Austrian frontier,’ some 44,000 persons, the reninant of a greater population, stretching south-east and north-east, in the Dolomite vafleys, and in the province of Udhe and the' territories of Gorizia and Gradisca, continue to speak the Latin tliey ’learned frqm the legionaries of Drusus and Tiberius. ■ ' They have preserved their language for nearly 2000 years and liave boasted a literature since the early sixteenth century. Wjthput entering into details on the “Latin, y as • opposed to the “Italian” origin of the Raeto-Roinance, it is enqugh to note the fact that all students of the language have had £o recognise its latin rather than its Italian origin. The ,RaetO;Rpmans have had to resist? especially during the last century, both German and’ltalian influence.