Switzerland’s Four Official Languages

Switzerland remains outside of the EU; however, it is definitely one of the centres of globalization. Switzerland is one of the main headquarters of multi-million dollar European corporations. Recently, Switzerland has been ranked as the third most globalized country in the world when evaluated on factors such as per capita number of international telecommunications, level of foreign investment, and share in trade economy. Swiss companies are known to be highly competitive in the world market, due to specialised skills and labour and high quality exported goods and products.Moreover, Switzerland the highly industrialized country, is known for its linguistic diversity, and this can only heighten its , international appeal for business and humanitarian organizations in the country. Switzerland’s four official languages, traditionally spoken in different regions in the country are French, German (Swiss German), Italian and Rumantsch or Romansch. In addition, there is a large percentage of the immigrants in Switzerland. Thus, there are some people who live in the country that don’t speak the four native languages of Switzerland.Tourists and business people may converse in English. However, some international Swiss companies declared the English language as a corporate language, especially during business meetings or while talking to customers. However, there has been a serious issue about this; this is because the majority of the Swiss people officially decided that the English language should not be the fifth language of their country. Therefore, once a conversation is taking place, whether it is related to business activities or politics, it should be expressed in one of their official national languages.The role of languages in Switzerland has been a big debate in the country. Swiss people still believe that if the English language became a lingua franca in the country, Switzerland would be much poorer, for some reasons. In Switzerland, policy makers, business and organizations give great importance to multilingualism as an effective tool to communicate, and to Swiss people being known to be a multilingual and multicultural community.In doing business in Switzerland, it is best to utilize interpreting and translation services, maybe not to translate every document into all of these four languages, but at least to one of the official languages that your business partners or your customers prefer to read and listen to. In a multilingual world, it is important that languages should be understood by everybody, and thus, utilizing translation and interpreting services are important for any business purposes.