Switzerland has just 8 million people, which are divided into two big language groups. And most people speak (or at least understand) English. So, it's natural for the algorithm to converge to content in English.
What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages (German, French and Italian) children and teens at school focus on learning one of the other two regions they are not from.
In particular this leads to French and Italian cantons to be moderately fluent in each other's language. Strikingly when I lived in Lausanne, more people knew Italian than English. English was really not on their radar (plus, add that francophones are kind of elitist when it comes to languages and don't really like to consume content that is not in french).
In German speaking Switzerland proficiency in English was still subpar from most of the rest of Europe when walking in a shop or going to a restaurant.
And even though I probably tend to agree with both of you, it's kinda funny to blame French or German speakers about being elitist against English speakers, of which native speakers are notoriously monolingual :-)
I'm just saying that in the French part of Switzerland English wasn't a given among any generation and it neither was common in the German/Italian parts too if you exclude the expats.
And yes, francophone tend to be very elitist about consuming exclusively french content, regardless of them being from France, Switzerland or Belgium.
It's litteraly your mother tongue man, everyone outside of the elite has a mother, and therefore a mother tongue, it's not expansive, it's your basic birth right.
Why don't people consume audio/video in a foreign language ?
I'm a polyglot myself, so I enjoy that very much, but the simple truth is that most people don't invest the time for becoming fluent in other languages in countries with a "big" language. Works for France, the US, the UK, Spain, Mexico, Japan or China.
Why ? Pretty obvious. Become fluent in a foreign language is a huge effort. Making that effort really only works if you either WANT to do it or if you NEED to do it. The WANT factor is the same everywhere but the NEED to learn a language is way lower if your mother tongue is in the top 5 - or top 10 languages of the world.
The only thing that is specific to French is that French & English have this weird shared history that makes the written langauges very similar and the oral languages very different. So a frequent compromise for french speakers is to become fluent enough at reading/writing, but quite bad at hearing/speaking.
You haven't. Francophones are different and way more elitist about their language.
I'm not gonna go in a long spree of anecdotes I've seen everyday.
Italian cantons usually focus on German and English, German rather learn English or Italian, French put up with English, and most stop learning the other official languages after the school year where they are compulsory.
Naturally a bit of stereotype, and each as a different experience.
Everyone always forgets Romansh...
This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.
About 40% of all Swiss inhabitants speak English at least once a week [1].
Anecdotally, I can't think of a single acquaintance younger than 50 years old that doesn't speak fluently. Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
Some of my German speaking friends even talk in English to French speaking people, even when both have learned the other‘s respective language at school.
[1]: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun...
We learn the other's respective language for 7 years, too. Yet, as you pointed out, people speak in English because there is no willingness to learn and apply the other's language.
Some of my friends speak English fluently, but I have a very hard bias as I work in IT. My whole family doesn't speak any language other than French. Most of the people I've been to school with don't come close to speaking English casually. None would watch an English content creator.
Due to the shared heritage between the English and German languages, perhaps it's different in the German-speaking region. If you ask someone slightly complicated English questions, they might not be completely lost - after all, some words share the same etymology. But Switzerland is absolutely not an English-speaking country at all.
But yes, I can mostly speak of the German-speaking part. People generally have little problems switching to English, and are used to speaking as well.
Many older people I know have no problems communicating in English when they‘re abroad.
Would be interesting to have the BFS statistics split by age group and region as well…
There are also other factors at play. Montréal has a fairly large community of native English speakers and receives a lot of tourism from Anglophone Canada and the United States due to its status as the largest city in Québec (and second largest in Canada). It also gets a lot of immigrants, many of which are (at least initially) more proficient in English than in French.
I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English. It also doesn't border any English-speaking countries. It seems English is mostly used as a lingua franca for communication between citizens who don't otherwise share a language rather than due to the direct presence of native Anglophones. Also, Romansh aside, all national languages of Switzerland (French, German and Italian) are spoken in areas that directly border a country where that language is the national language (France, Italy, Germany/Austria). With Switzerland being in the Schengen Area, its linguistic regions may be considered to be part of a much larger individual linguistic communities, which I feel may also diminish the need to learn other languages.
The language of French Switzerland is French. You'll never hear German, Italian, or Romansch. If you only spoke German and not French or English, you really couldn't live there very effectively (only places like Bern or Basel are truly multi-lingual), yes you'll get your official docs in German but then what? I assume the same is true in German speaking Switzerland, and I have no idea about Italian Switzerland.
If a Swiss German and Swiss French met for coffee, what language do you think they would wind up speaking? Perhaps English if neither had comfortable fluency in the other language. Not to take away from your point, but English can get you really far in this world.
Until they think you're a tourist. If they hear you speak another language than English and you seem like you're a tourist, then almost every Quebecer will try his best to speak English even if it means using hand and feet to communicate.
But if they think even for a second that you're actually Canadian, then outside Montreal and even in some parts of Montreal you will be met with the full force of Quebecois pride and nationalism and you better speak French to them.
You definitely won't get 'Southern Charm' or small town feel in NYC. Of course, trying to nail down what exactly is American is gonna be hard to do.
I would definitely not say that if you go to Tokyo you can get the Japanese experience. You get some of it, of course but to say you can get a grasp or even a handful of understanding without ever seeing rice fields and gardens interspersed with houses, beaches with people fishing and immediately turning the catch into sashimi, towns where nothing new has been built since the bubble...
You can't see and feel that in the hustle and bustle, where everyone moves to get away from having neighbors who know all about you, where night is erased by the neon glow.
This is true but also because the US is geographically and culturally diverse this is impossible in any given city. And that applies equally to none-touristy cities. You're not going to get a broad sense of America from Oklahoma City, either.
The smaller and more homogeneous the country, the easier it is to generalize and get a sense from even a single sample point.
Montreal, never mind tourism, is more English than the rest of Quebec. Depending on which part you're in nobody bats an eye if you don't speak French to them.
In other parts of Montreal and definitely in the rest of Quebec, big city or not, you better speak French unless they think you are a tourist. You can be out in the Beauce but if you look, act and speak like a (non Canadian) tourist they suddenly try their best at English. Quebec City is definitely a city and representative of the rest of Quebec with regards to language (minus tourists). Montreal much less so. There are a bunch of small towns across Quebec that are also very English.
That exists in other provinces as well, where things are very French in the middle of an English speaking province. Acadia comes to mind. Manitoba has some French parts.
> Swiss German (Standard German: Schweizerdeutsch, Alemannic German: Schwiizerdütsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch Mundart, and others; Romansh: Svizzers Tudestg) is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and in some Alpine communities in Northern Italy bordering Switzerland.
All Swiss-German is an Alemannic dialect, not all Alemannic dialects are Swiss-German, is how I'd interpret that.
I find kind of ironic that I have better fluency between the official languages than many of my Swiss friends and work colleagues.