Page 1 - Italian American Herald - September 2021

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Local father
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SEPTEMBER 2021
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The Lugano Città–Stazione funicular connects passengers from the historic city center on Lake Lugano to the main railway station on Monte San Salvatore.
The linguistic enigma of Switzerland
Italian language and culture flourish in cantons of Ticino and Grissons
By Jeanne Outlaw-Cannavo
Switzerland, where four linguistic regions and multiple cultures flourish, is a unique melting pot. The country is small, about
the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, with a population of approximately 8,724,000. Switzerland is known worldwide for its stunning mountain ranges (the Alps
to the south and Jura to the north), as an international banking headquarters, the Swiss Guard, cheese and chocolate and the Red Cross. It is also famous for the manufacturing of Swiss knives and watches. Germany, Austria, France, and Italy surround this
small area of landlocked beauty.
In this multitude of identities that
characterize the territory, Italian-speaking
Switzerland is often little known, even by the Swiss themselves. There are 26 cantons in Switzerland where German, French, Italian and Romansh are all spoken. The Italian language is prominent in the region that includes the Canton of Ticino and four valleys of the Canton of Grisons, the only trilingual area in Switzerland. The Mesolcina, the Calanca, the Bregaglia and the Valposchiavo form the so-called Grigionitaliano. It is often a surprise to travelers from other countries to find themselves in these areas and wonder if they may still be in Italy.
Years ago, our family traveled through this area while heading to visit the Furka Pass in the Canton of Valais. During our stay in Lugano, we were pleasantly surprised to find the owner of our motor inn was from Italy.
Our cousin’s daughter commented several times on crowds cheering for Italy during a soccer game on TV while we were dining in town. When we visited a carved-out ice cave
at the Rhone Glacier we spoke to a guide (dressed as a polar bear) in Italian even though he was originally from Poland. It turned out that he spoke several languages, as did other people we encountered in the region.
In the Italian-speaking cantons the official language is Italian, flanked by a dialectal reality so rich it could fill an encyclopedia. The third national language is spoken by about 8.1 percent of the population in this area, or 590,000 people. Italian also resonates in the cities of German and French Switzerland: more than half of Italian speakers live outside of the Italian regions of Switzerland, a
presence also due to immigration from Italy, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the third largest community of Italians abroad is in Switzerland. The language is vibrant throughout the territory.
A unified language does not exist in Switzerland, and this gives rise to challenges but also great opportunities. Speaking another lingua franca, such as English or
an elusive "Swiss," would at first seem to facilitate understanding each other between linguistic regions, but multilingualism
has always been a fundamental part of
the country's identity and represents an important value. It officially became a distinctive feature of Switzerland in 1848,
continued on page 5
Vol. 8 / No. 9