Romansh

[laughs] But imagine if it was written in several different languages.

So they do have a common, um, language, I guess, of government, uh, Romansh or something like that.

Uh, but, uh, for the most part, you go to different parts of Switzerland, you see signs in different languages there.

So it was a system that was designed to help people, uh, negotiate these cultural, linguistic, religious differences that they had there.

They even have French.

Romanish speakers.

And here, we also have various other identities, the Druze, the Samaritans, and it's a wonderful mosaic of identities, and really suited to a federal system, as David has mentioned.

But there are many other examples, not only Switzerland's that we can talk about.

There were families up there, and a few trail runners, and a group of older men who sat at a bench with their coffee flasks and discussed something in the broad, soft dialect of the region, and I wished, not for the first time, that my German were better than it is.

The Romansh language, which I keep coming back to since I arrived in Graubünden, is spoken in scattered valleys not far from here, and there is something about this canton, maybe the way three languages rub against each other, the way the names on the signs shift as you move east, that makes me wanna understand more than I do.

I walked along the ridge until the sun got high and the morning hikers began to thin out, and then I took the gondola back down, the valley opening out in front of me as we descended.

The ride down is, if anything, more spectacular than the ride up because the town slowly reassembles itself below, the streets and the river and the old walls all coming back into focus, and I thought about how many centuries of people must have stood on this mountain and looked down at this same view.

There were places where the gorge opened out into wider valley floor with patches of meadow and a few scattered farm buildings, and then it would close in again.

I thought about the Romansh language, which is spoken in these valleys.

Chur itself is mostly German-speaking, but you see Romansh everywhere if you look.

Street names, bilingual signs, the names of villages and mountains and rivers.

It is a descendant of the Latin spoken by Romansh Rhaetians, and it is apparently the most endangered of the four Swiss national languages.

People are trying to keep it alive, and it's woven into the identity of this canton in ways that feel deep and slightly mysterious, like the layers of rock in the gorge.

[bird chirping] By the time I got back to the station, I was properly wet.

Italian is spoken in the area that we had just climbed through on this train ride.

Then in this area, Romansh, which is an ancient language, is still an official language of this region.

German is spoken to the north of the divide, and French in the west.

So as we continued along this journey, we had passed through three of the four language areas of Switzerland.