ZURICH. Ask a room of Swiss executives what language their company runs on and the honest answer, more often than not, is English. Ask the same room whether Switzerland's four national languages are a treasure and watch the hands go up. Both answers cannot be true at once, and the gap between them is where this column lives.
The thesis is simple: four languages are a competitive and civic advantage of the first rank, and we are letting it erode out of sheer laziness. Not malice, not policy, just the path of least resistance, taken one meeting, one job advert and one university course at a time.
The erosion is measurable. Italian, the smallest of the four, is retreating in the schools and the media even inside Ticino. Romansh survives on subsidy and stubbornness. And in the federal administration, where language quotas exist precisely to stop drift, the drift continues, documented in report after report that everyone praises and nobody reads.
English fills the vacuum because English is easy. It is the language of the laboratory, the trading floor and the multinational headquarters, and no one should apologise for using it. The problem is not that the Swiss speak English; it is that increasingly they speak only English, to each other. The Röstigraben, once crossed by translation, is now crossed by a lingua franca that belongs to no canton.
The pragmatic case against fussing is not stupid. Language policy costs money, translation is expensive, and forcing a Zurich engineer through Italian classes because of a quota feels like the state at its most pedantic. If the market has chosen English, perhaps the market is right.
Perhaps, but the market is answering a different question. The market asks what is cheapest this quarter. A country has to ask what holds it together across decades, and what it sells to the world besides watches and certainty. The inner life of a confederation is not a luxury; it is the constitution written in conversation. A Switzerland that cannot talk to itself in its own languages has outsourced its inner life.
What the debate gets wrong is the framing of languages as folklore, a matter of heritage evenings and subsidised theatre. They are infrastructure. The executive who can negotiate in German, French and Italian needs no interpreter between Zurich and Milan, and the official who drafts a law in three languages drafts it more precisely in each.
The cost of inaction falls hardest on the smallest partner. When Italian goes, Ticino does not become more Swiss; it becomes more alienated, a periphery addressed in a foreign tongue by its own capital. A country that lets that happen will spend far more on the politics of grievance than it ever saved on translation.
A serious policy would be unglamorous and cumulative. Exchange semesters between language regions, funded properly and taken seriously. Real money for Italian-language media, which is a public good by any honest definition. And language requirements for senior federal office that are enforced rather than admired.
Employers have a role that would cost them little. Job adverts that demand English alone, for roles that touch the whole country, should raise the same eyebrow as adverts that once demanded a particular passport. The labour market follows the signals it is sent, and at the moment we are sending the wrong one.
None of this requires hostility to English, which will remain the world's waiting room whatever Bern decrees. It requires only that we stop treating our own asset as a museum piece. Museums are where advantages go when no one can be bothered to use them.
The hands in that executive room go up because the four languages are loved. The meetings run in English because love, unattended, is not a policy. Switzerland is one of the few countries on earth that can genuinely think in four tongues. It should start acting like the advantage is real, because it is.