Le Bolze: Switzerland's Fifth Language | Hacker News Reader

Le Bolze: Switzerland's Fifth Language

bbc.com

83 pointsMiriamWeiner27 comments

As someone that has had the pleasure of living in Switzerland, I would rather say that Le Bolze would be sixth language.

Given that English, although not an official language, is what gets used by most nationals across language borders, given that many of them don´t bother to practice the other languages beyond what is required in school.

I always found ironic that I can switch easier across German, French and Italian than most of my Swiss friends.

Yeah and how most swiss youngsters will now switch to English instead of national languages when only crossing the röstigraben.

A bit depressing if you ask me. Yet, here we are talking to each other in the 5th national language on an American website ;)

I'd rather have people communicate in English than not communicate at all (e.g. see Reds vs. Blues in the US).

I grew up in Geneva, and I blame this on way German is taught over here.

What you learn in middle-school is fairly casual, but it doesn't go very deep. Then high-school switches to a more academic approach even though you're still lacking conversational skills. While I loved reading Zweig or Kafka, this was an extremely inefficient way to teach me the language. I'd have had a lot more fun focusing on speaking in German (and Swiss German). It might have been a little hard back then, but nowadays it'd be fairly trivial to have regular videochat sessions between students on both sides of the language border.

English is a lot easier. First, whether you want it or not, you'll get exposure and interaction, especially in a city like Geneva. The learning curve is a lot less steep as well. I could read proper, non-simplified books after only 2 years of high-school classes.

I believe some cantons are doing better (Fribourg, Bern, maybe Jura and Valais). But nothing beats the system in Luxembourg where a good chunk of classes are taught in German during middle-school, then French in high-school.

I lived and worked in Geneva for a couple of years as an older adult. While I went to the trouble of learning written and spoken French (which I love as a language), I was really surprised at how little I ever required it in everyday activities.

BTW, I really loved Switzerland and Geneva in particular.

German national, Swiss resident of 10 years here.

The audio sample is pretty understandable. Obviously the speaker took great care to enunciate clearly for the recording, so he sounds like he speaks very understandable Swiss German with a lot of French vocabulary thrown in. Like a French exchange student or the like.

I am a Swiss, living 20km from Fribourg and having a lot of contact with people from Fribourg. I thought the same as the parent. It seems also that most words are actually spoken in German and only a few nouns are French.

I have a friend speaking Le Bolze. When he is around Swiss Germans, he still speaks it, altough in a much less pronounced fashion. He uses much more German words and only occasionally the odd French word.

Alao a Swiss resident here: Totally agree. It's basically just Swiss German with some French nouns.

The dialect of Valais is a lot harder to understand than this. But I guess in normal conversation it's a different case again.

(Also a Swiss resident here)

Another interesting language is (rather, was) "Matten-Englisch", something like Pig-Latin, "because people wanted to communicate in a way the police would not understand": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattenenglisch

I agree, it is swiss german with some nouns exchanged with french nouns. I guess the example audio is not really a good example. On the wikipedia page for "Bolze" you actually see that there are special words that only exists in Bolze.

As a Swiss I'm quite puzzled why the author thinks it is another language. The audio sample disproves the claim in the article that even with full command of French and Swiss-German, you can't understand it. Sure, it can be hard to follow, but the same is true for other dialects in the country.

I think given the title, "the Swiss language that few know", they should have picked Romansh. The fourth official language of Switzerland that got completely overlooked by the article. A descendant language of the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire. Haven't met many people around the world who have heard of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElfJX-4yET0

To be fair, the article mentions Romansh and links to another article only about our fourth language[0]

I agree the sample is not difficult to understand as a nativ Swiss-German speaker. Only thing that comes to mind is that it's a Bernese (?) Swiss-German dialect which is not always easy to understand for 'proper' German speakers.

But in my opinion almost every single dialect in Switzerland has it's own specific words and almost every canton has it's own dialect so I wouldn't call them a language.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180627-switzerlands-myster...

The article explicitly mentions St. Moritz (which you could call the epicenter of romansh) as a german speaking town.

That example raised my eyebrow as well while reading.

My guess is, that it's be most famous example city for the eastern parts, although for British people Klosters would be a known alternative as well, their cable car booth is name "Prince of Wales" and in the Prättigau they rarely speak Romansh

I live in Geneva and don't speak Swiss German at all. So, for me it's the opposite: something I don't understand with a few familiar words :)

I find it fascinating how mixing vocabulary and grammatical rules from two different languages can create something which is not understandable by speakers of only one of those language, especially when spoken fast.

In my circle of friends/family we're all bilingual french/english, so when speaking to eachother we tend to speak with a mix of both while conserving proper British and French prononciation. Sometimes conjugating English verbs in French and vice-versa. A normal sentence would be: "Je book a table et on se voit downtown". In an isolated society it would probably evolve into a creole, but our little pidgin will certainly die with us.

I do the same when I have to converse in 2 or more languages daily.

"On a besoin a room fuer zwei Personen por tres noches!" -- me to the housekeeper in the Dominican Republic (she did not understand it, but we had a good laugh)

I love the fact that I can understand that even though I consider myself largely monolingual. The only word I had to look up was zwei though it is clear from context that it is a number.

It’d be interesting as well to know if someone from your family and someone from another family who were doing the same kind of thing with English/French would be able to communicate very easily, or if your family and the other family would be combining the languages in each of your sufficiently unique ways that the two families would actually struggle a little to understand the other.

Something similar happens to my Finnish friends growing up in Sweden. When they speak Finnish in Finland, sometimes the response is ?????? They were using too many words clearly imported from Swedish, but with Finnish pronunciation and conjugation in their sentences. (Easily understood by anyone fluent in both Swedish and Finnish.)

Yes, this is very widespread amongst multilingual families, it even has a name: code-switching.

People do it almost unconsciously in many places where cultures mix (e.g. Singapore where "Singlish" can almost be considered its own language at this point)

I lived in the Alsace region of France for awhile and there is a local dialect of German/French there called Alsatian. We used to ride our bikes down the Levee to a village called Le Wantzeneau and get the local version of Pizza from a food truck.

The language is, as I've suggested, a weird combination of both French and German, and it seems to be spoken through the nose somewhat. It reminded me a lot of Cajun French, which I heard a lot of as a kid.

I'm really for maintaining regional languages. I missed out on a Cajun French revival as a kid but I'm planning on sending my son down for immersion camp.

In an era where economies of scale are an overwhelming pressure on culture, maintaining a region's own weird language is kind of rebellion. It calls to mind the Cajun folk hero Dudley LeBlanc who skirted FDA regulation on his bullshit patent medicine (itself merely a way of bypassing the prohibition on alcohol sales) by advertising it on local Cajun French radio stations (which regulators had trouble understanding). Speaking multiple languages is anti-authoritarian!

Somewhat similar: Citéduits, a nearly extinct German-Dutch mixed language spoken in the mining town of Eisden, Belgium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoJGWUzjtd4 .

tl;dr; in the historical city center of Fribourg, at the border between French and German speaking Switzerland, there are still a few speakers of a dialect originated in the 19th century that adds some French lexicon to the Swiss German dialect.

You mean some more, Swiss German (and to a lesser extent even Standard German) has plenty of French vocabulary already.

That's what I was thinking as well: a dialect. This isn't a language. There are so many dialects in The Netherlands and Belgium, with different ancestors. Together with their accent they are part of a local region's history. However, the The Netherlands has only 2 official languages: Dutch and Frisian. The Frisian language is also an official language in Germany, and its spoken also in Denmark. See [1]. Zeelandic, however, spoken in the province of Zeeland (in the south-west of The Netherlands) is a dialect. It isn't an officially recognized language. The point being: this isn't unique to Switzerland. What is unique to Switzerland is it having four official languages (German, French, Italian, Romansh), none of which is spoken mainly in Switzerland. Nowadays, due to migration and globalization, a country contains many spoken and written languages anyway. For example, in the city of Zaandam there is a large Portuguese community.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages

There's plenty of other language in each canton (country subdivision). There would be like 20 languages at least if we count each modification of German, French, or Italien, each part of the canton use specific argot. I would not count Bolze has a language because of that. Like patois vaudois, patois fribourgeois, valaisan, etc.

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