You think we have two languages on this island? We have three. That is, according to some members of the Belfast City Council - and to many more outside. For, in the series City Hall, Which the BBC is running on Wednesday evenings, a case was made - in that Ulster-Scots which its adherents claim to be a language and not a mere dialect - calls for its recognition alongside English and Irish. How much the member of the City Council is involved was not clear, but there is an Ulster-Scots Language Society, founded in 1992 "to promote the status and reestablish the dignity of Ulster-Scots as a language". It is a variant, wrote its secretary some time ago, a variant of the language spoken today in the Lowlands of Scotland, often called Lallans. Well. They have published a book by James Fenton The Hamely Tongue. It is published by the Ulster Scots Language Society.
But what of a country that has no less than four languages, one of them with variations and additional dialect colourings? The country is Switzerland, comparable in size with ourselves but with a bigger population. There they speak French, German, Italian and Romanche. A multicultural society, indeed, and, most interesting, the Federal Government has been increasing the money devoted to this fourth and weakest language Romanche. The figures given in an article by Ruth Nabakwe in the magazine Europ show that French is now spoken by 19.2 per cent of the population, a slight rise since 1980; German is the language of 63.6 per cent, slightly down, and Italian stands at 7.6 per cent, down from 9.8 per cent. As for the poor Romanche language, its decline seems irreversible, the article states, for only 39,600 people declare it to be their mother tongue. That is 0.6 per cent against 0.8 per cent in 1980.
This language has no urban or commercial foundation. Its speakers are chiefly in the valleys of the canton of Grisons. Here all learn the German language too, and German is, it appears winning out. But the Federal Statistics Office says that the biggest handicap is the lack of linguistic unity: there are several dialects within the language, and unity is necessary, writes the author, to safeguard the Romanche language and culture.
To show some of the linguistic cross-currents in the Federation, the director of a big newspaper in Zurich says that while their articles are all written in High German, the language of Berlin and Vienna, "our editorial conferences are all in the local dialect Schwyzertutsch." Y