Immigrant Languages
The immigrant language with the largest number of native speakers is Serbo-Croatian, with 103,000 speakers (1.4%) in 2000, followed by Albanian with 95,000 (1.3%), Portuguese with 90,000 (1.2%), Spanish with 78,000 (1.1%), English with 73,000 (1.0%), Turkish with 14,000 (0.2%), Dutch with 12,000 (0.2%), Russian with 9,000 (0.1%), Chinese with 8,300 (0.1%), Thai with 7,600 (0.1%), Kurdish with 7,500 (0.1%), and Macedonian with 6,400 (0.1%). Speakers of all other non-official languages totaled 173,000. Altogether, roughly 10 percent of the population has a native language other than the four official languages.
Read more about this topic: Languages Of Switzerland
Famous quotes containing the words immigrant and/or languages:
“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
“The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)