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( Linguistic geography of Switzerland)
The linguistic geography of Switzerland is on the main tripartite, with the Swiss German region (Deutschschweiz) in the northeast, the Swiss French part (Romandie) in the west and the Swiss Italian Ticino in the south. There remains a small Romansh speaking minority in the Grisons. The four official languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian and Romansh. Native speakers number about 64% (4.6 million) for German (mostly Swiss German dialects), 20% (1.5 million, mostly Swiss French, but including some Arpitan dialects) for French, 7% (0.5 million, mostly Swiss Italian, but including Lombardic dialects) for Italian and less than 0.5% (35,000) for Romansh. The Cantons of Fribourg, Berne, Valais and Grisons are officially bi- or trilingual (Grisons). In fact, Jura and Ticino are also bilingual, but the traditional German minority is very small. Development of linguistic demographics in Switzerland since 1950 according to official census data
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