National Museum Zurich | Museum pays homage to Swiss multilingualism

The Reformation and the printing press also led to the advent of a standard written language in German-speaking Switzerland, although dialects were less stigmatised. Indeed, the opposite was true from the 19th century onwards, with the first-ever dictionary of Swiss-German vernacular being published in 1881. In the 15th century, notaries in Italian-speaking Ticino discarded Latin and began writing in a lingua franca derived from the Lombard vernacular. Ultimately, it was the Tuscan Italian championed by Dante that established itself as the written and administrative language, and later as the spoken language through teaching in schools.

The Romansh language region used to stretch to the shores of Lake Constance but was quickly outmuscled by German. Romansh is now composed of five different dialects spread along the valleys of Grisons. Rumantsch Grischun evolved into the unified written language in the 1980s and has been used as the official form of Romansh since 2001.

The exhibition reminds visitors that Switzerland also has other languages that go back a long way. One of them is Yenish, which features on a wooden display. Furthermore, an embroidery sampler containing Hebrew lettering is proof that a form of Western Yiddish was spoken in the Surb Valley in Aargau until the last century.