Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
In Swiss federalism, the French cantons are French, the German cantons are German and the Italian cantons are Italian. The distinctions are very strict, much more so than what we have in Canada.
I have been to Switzerland, but have not spent much time there. In the major cities like Zurich or Geneva, are there any German minorities (in Geneva) or French minorities in Zurich, and if so, are there any provisions in the Swiss constitution that they receive services in their minority language?
My gut feeling is "no", but does anyone know the answer?
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This was a good question and I realize no one answered you.
I actuallly studied Switzerland and other multi-national states (which includes Canada BTW) in a previous life.
Switzerland as you allude to actually has a fairly strict language territoriality, which is the term they use.
Basically language rights are not transportable from one language region to the other, as they (sort of) are in Canada.
The German areas are German only, the French areas French only and the Italian areas Italian only. Obviously people do move from region to region but they are expected to fit in (ie mostly use the local language when they leave the house) and by and large in my observation that's what people do.
As the country is highly decentralized most of the services you receive from government are cantonal or municipal as opposed to federal, and so are only in one language. Even Swiss citizenship is devolved to the cantons, and so if you moved to Zurich from Haiti and want to become a Swiss citizen, you need to know German. French won't cut it even if it is an official language of the country you're in.
I don't know for sure if the Swiss federal government in its activities offers minority language services (ie French in Geneva, German in Zurich) but based on signage and paperwork that I saw, I would suspect they do not. Or at least, they are under no obligation to so.
There are no schools that teach primarily in the minority languages in any of the cantons. A rather famous court case involved francophone parents in Zurich who wanted to open a private French school, which the canton opposed. It went to the highest court in the land which ruled that the Kanton von Zurich had the right to maintain its German character and could ban French schools, even private.
There is one exception which is Bern the federal capital. It apparently has a francophone school for the children of French speaking government officials. Though aside from this Bern even if the capital of the country is a wholly German speaking city and has no obvious bilingualism or trilingualism at all, not even close to the level of Ottawa.
Switzerland actually has a couple of bilingual cantons, but it's not what Canadians would envision by that. Bilingual cantons are still split up into single language areas. It's not bilingual across the whole canton.
In all of Switzerland, there are only two bilingual towns AFAIK (rare exceptions that confirm the rule): Fribourg-Freiburg and Biel-Bienne. That's it.