A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language

Switzerland’s least known national language, Romansh, is spoken by less than one per cent of the population. It’s splintered into five major “idioms,” not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. A linguist came up with a plan to standardize the language: a “majority principle” in which the most widely shared spellings across the idioms would win out. In doing so, he ignited quarrels that engulfed Swiss classrooms, newspapers, and eventually local politics; his lingua franca was denounced as a “bastard,” a “castrated” tongue, an act of “linguistic murder.” Simon Akam reports on how a very small language sparked a big fight