Population
Even though the Swiss Plateau takes only about 30% of the surface of Switzerland, 5 million people live there, which constitutes more than two thirds of the Swiss population. The population density is 380 people per square kilometer. All the Swiss cities with more than 50 000 inhabitants except Basel and Lugano are situated in the plateau, especially Bern, Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich. The agglomerations of these cities are the most populous areas. Other densely populated areas are the south edge of the Jura and the agglomerations of Lucerne, Winterthur and St. Gallen. Regions of the higher Swiss Plateau like the Jorat region, the Napf region or the Töss region are comparatively scarcely populated with little farming villages and scattered farms.
A majority is German-speaking, though the west is French-speaking. The language border has been stable for many centuries even though it falls neither on a geographical nor on a political delimitation. It passes from Biel/Bienne over Murten/Morat and Freiburg/Fribourg to the Fribourg Alps. The cities of Biel/Bienne, Murten/Morat and Freiburg/Fribourg are officially bilingual. Localities along the language border have usually both a German and a French name.
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Famous quotes containing the word population:
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)