Geneva (dpa) – The tale of the two foreigners who asked a Zurich taxi driver to take them to the city’s “Unique Airport”, as shown on their ticket, and found themselves several hours later crossing the border into Germany headed for Munich Airport illustrates the point.
In Switzerland English is trendy and everybody who is anybody speaks the language too.
Words like resort and taskforce, water conservation slogans like the happy shower campaign all reveal the trend towards the international language.
Schoolchildren have started insisting: “We want English,” threatening a 25-year national consensus that the other languages of the trilingual country – German, French and Italian – should have priority when it comes to learning a second language at school.
“The End of Switzerland” is how Le Temps, a French newspaper in Geneva sees the trend.
Responding to pressure from the youngsters and their parents, the canton of Zurich, regarded by many in the confederation as arrogant in any case, has now opted for English as the main foreign language in the curriculum.
Its education director, Ernst Buschor, has taken the decision unilaterally in conflict with an agreement between the cantons struck in 1975.
His counterpart in Neuchatel, Thierry Beguin, has referred to a “blow struck against national unity”, and Buschor has been termed a traitor.
“Take it easy,” has been his relaxed response.
“The trend towards English is irreversible. Opinion surveys show that parents prefer English to be taught,” he says, adding that they also show that a quarter of all Swiss would prefer to use English as the language in which they deal with their countrymen from the other language groups.
Many German Swiss are sick of having their accents laughed at when they attempt to speak to the locals in French Switzerland in their own language.
The same goes for French speakers trying out their High German, acquired after hours of study at school, in the German areas. German Swiss is very different from the version they have learned.
In addition parents and children fear they could be at a disadvantage if they do not become proficient in English – particularly with regard to the Internet – through spending their youth slaving away at German nouns and French subjunctives.
Private tuition in English is all the rage, with children as young as three learning the language. Buschor is critical of the trend, fearing it might create a rift in schools between those proficient in English and those without the means to attend the additional classes.
Three quarters of all parents in German-speaking Switzerland back the teaching of English as the first foreign language in schools, while in the French-speaking part of the country, only 45 per cent take a similar view.
Patriotism is scarcely the reason, for behind the numbers is the brute fact that French speakers need German to get on in Switzerland, whereas the reverse is not true.
Some two thirds of Swiss are German-speaking, 19 per cent French, eight per cent Italian and one per cent speak the Rhaeto-Romanic language.
Education officials from the cantons meet on November 2 to discuss the issue, but Zurich’s unilateral decision appears to have opened the floodgates, with reports suggesting that 14 of the 26 cantons have opted for English.
“Let’s go,” was how the German-language newspaper Sonntagsblick saw the issue.
