ABSTRACT
Although Switzerland is a multilingual country, this national multilingualism is not accompanied by widespread individual multilingualism. Apart from the Svizra retorumantscha where bilingualism is the rule, most of the Italian-, French- or German-speaking Swiss grow up monolingually. However, there is a considerable amount of work migration within Switzerland (see Lüdi 1994) and from abroad, of which the Italian immigration into the German-speaking area has received most attention in the linguistic literature (see, among others, Berruto 1991, Pizzolotto 1991, Franceschini, Müller and Schmid 1984). All in all, according to a 1990 census, some 15 per cent of the population in the German-speaking cantons claim to have a language other than German as their ‘main language’, some 23 per cent in the French-speaking cantons a language other than French, and some 17 per cent in the Italian-speaking cantons a language other than Italian. Since all of them and a part of their children (who may have claimed the majority language of the canton to be their ‘main language’) are bilingual, the degree of individual bilingualism introduced by work migration is considerable: 4.3 per cent of the informants in the German-speaking area have Italian as their ‘main language’, and 4.2 per cent in the French-speaking area (see Franceschini 1994:37).
