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:
“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
—Anonymous.
An axiom from economics popular in the 1960s, the words have no known source, though have been dated to the 1840s, when they were used in saloons where snacks were offered to customers. Ascribed to an Italian immigrant outside Grand Central Station, New York, in Alistair Cooke’s America (epilogue, 1973)
“The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.”
—Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1934)