Romansh Language
Romansh (also spelled Romansch, Rumants(c)h, or Romanche; Romansh: rumantsch/ rumauntsch/ romontsch/rumà ntsch; German: Rätoromanisch; Italian: Romancio) is a Rhaeto-Romance language descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken by the Roman era occupiers of the region. It is closely related to French, Occitan, and Lombard, as well as the other Romance languages to a lesser extent. Romansh is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, French and Italian.
In the 2000 Swiss census, 35,095 people (of which 27,038 in the canton of Grisons) indicated Romansh as the language of "best command", and 61,815 also as a "regularly spoken" language. Spoken by around 0.9% of Switzerland's 7.7 million inhabitants, Romansh is Switzerland's least-used national language in terms of number of speakers and the tenth most spoken language in Switzerland overall.
Read more about Romansh Language: Linguistic Classification, Geographic Distribution, Dialects, Official Status in Switzerland and Language Politics, Romansh Literature and Music, Romansh in The Media, Sample Text
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)