Lumpers and Splitters in the Alps

Hillbilly Latin or Romansh is spoken by 1/200 Swissmen.

The Grisons, Switzerland

From The New Yorker:

Letter from Switzerland

A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language

In the Swiss Alps, a plan to tidy up Romansh—spoken by less than one per cent of the country—set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity.

By Simon Akam

December 1, 2025

Romansch is a surviving form of Hillbilly Latin spoken in southeastern Switzerland by less than 100,000 people, virtually all of whom also speak German. Perhaps 40,000 primarily speak Romansch.

Like everywhere in Switzerland these days, the Grisons in southeast Switzerland, the canton where Romansch is most commonly found, is pretty rich, so the local government doesn’t have much trouble subsidizing the use of this antique language.

One bug/feature of Romansch is that there are at least five written dialects of Romansch (with some saying there are or were up to 21 sub-dialects).

The one city of any size that once spoke Romansch, Chur, the capital of the Grisons, burned to the ground shortly after Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450. Chur was rebuilt by German artisans, many of whom settled there. So, the one place big enough to have supported an early (and thus expensive) printing press no longer spoke Romansch.

Printed texts in Romansch didn’t emerge until the 19th Century, and then in a boutique form where each valley got its own written form of Romansch. At present, school textbooks are printed in five separate written dialects of Romansch. The smallest only has one school.

That sounds ridiculously wasteful, so in 1982 began a campaign to agglomerate the spelling of the five main Romansh dialects into one easy-to-spell version. But there has been so much pushback against this idea that now there are six different subdialects of Romansch: the original five plus the new synthetic dialectic.

Swell.

The New Yorker reporter is pretty bemused by all this. Although it is perfectly reasonable to think of Romansh as an indigenous language of Europe, Europeans are largely denied the privilege of indigeneity. So New Yorker correspondents are allowed to think much more realistically, unemotionally, and sensibly about various sets of white people squabbling over ancient languages than if this were a nonwhite vs. white dispute.