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Lived in Switzerland and this is really not true.

What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages (German, French and Italian) children and teens at school focus on learning one of the other two regions they are not from.

In particular this leads to French and Italian cantons to be moderately fluent in each other's language. Strikingly when I lived in Lausanne, more people knew Italian than English. English was really not on their radar (plus, add that francophones are kind of elitist when it comes to languages and don't really like to consume content that is not in french).

In German speaking Switzerland proficiency in English was still subpar from most of the rest of Europe when walking in a shop or going to a restaurant.

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secstate 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not to derail, but when I was in Switzerland, I found the German Swiss to be far more elitarian about NOT learning French, than the other way around. And French Swiss being a minority, they kinda got treated as other or less-than in the bulk of Switzerland. But all German Swiss are at least willing to try English, while the French Swiss tend to avoid English, so maybe that's where the vibe comes from?

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oblio 8 hours ago | parent [-]

For both you and OP, first of you, thank you for "elitarian", but even after reading the definition, I still think you both meant "elitist".

And even though I probably tend to agree with both of you, it's kinda funny to blame French or German speakers about being elitist against English speakers, of which native speakers are notoriously monolingual :-)

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epolanski 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't blame anyone, I'm Italian and I'm fluent in French, English and Polish besides Italian.

I'm just saying that in the French part of Switzerland English wasn't a given among any generation and it neither was common in the German/Italian parts too if you exclude the expats.

And yes, francophone tend to be very elitist about consuming exclusively french content, regardless of them being from France, Switzerland or Belgium.

	▲	anonyme-honteux 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Using your mother tongue is elitist" is bullshit on an epic scale. It's litteraly your mother tongue man, everyone outside of the elite has a mother, and therefore a mother tongue, it's not expansive, it's your basic birth right. Why don't people consume audio/video in a foreign language ? I'm a polyglot myself, so I enjoy that very much, but the simple truth is that most people don't invest the time for becoming fluent in other languages in countries with a "big" language. Works for France, the US, the UK, Spain, Mexico, Japan or China. Why ? Pretty obvious. Become fluent in a foreign language is a huge effort. Making that effort really only works if you either WANT to do it or if you NEED to do it. The WANT factor is the same everywhere but the NEED to learn a language is way lower if your mother tongue is in the top 5 - or top 10 languages of the world. The only thing that is specific to French is that French & English have this weird shared history that makes the written langauges very similar and the oral languages very different. So a frequent compromise for french speakers is to become fluent enough at reading/writing, but quite bad at hearing/speaking.

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sschueller 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Switzerland has 4 official languages and English is not one of them.