Plurilingual Switzerland

Switzerland deals flexibly and pragmatically with plurilingualism. It does this successfully. Nevertheless, immigration and increasing international integration are posing new challenges to schools, economy and administration. If the potential of multilingualism can be tapped, it will be beneficial to the community. While small in size, Switzerland is wealthy in languages. The constitution recognizes four national languages (German, French, Italian and Rhaeto Romanic), three of which are official languages (German, French and Italian) while many other languages such as Spanish, Albanian, English, Portuguese and Turkish are also spoken. How does the country deal with this diversity of language? Amazingly well, as several projects discovered, although the potential of plurilingualism is clearly not fully realised.