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( Romansh language)
Romansh (also spelled Rumantsh, Rumantsch, Romansch, or Romanche) is one of the four official languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French. It is one of the Rhaeto-Romance languages, believed to have descended from the Vulgar Latin variety spoken by Roman era occupiers of the region, and, as such, is closely related to French, Occitan and North Italian, as well as other Romance languages to a lesser extent. As of the 2000 Swiss Census, it is spoken by 35,095[1] residents of the canton of Graubünden (Grisons) as the language of "best command", and 60,815 in the "best command" plus "most spoken" categories[2]. Spoken now by around 0.9% of Switzerland's 7.5 million inhabitants, it is Switzerland's least-used national language in terms of number of speakers. The five largest dialects in the Romansh family are Romansh is spoken in the Swiss canton of Grisons or Graubünden, "the Grey League", which preserves the name of the self-defense organization of Romance speakers set up in the 15th century. It became part of Switzerland in 1803. Germans once called this language Chur-Wälsch, "foreign speech of Chur", for Chur was once the center of Romansh. This is cited as one possible explanation of the origin of the modern term "Kauderwelsch" meaning gibberish. However, most of Grisons, including Chur and even its cross-river suburb of Wälschdorfli ("foreign-language-speaking village"), now speak German; Romansh survives only in the upper valleys of the Rhine and the Inn. Romansh was nationally standardised in 1982 by Zürich-based linguist Heinrich Schmid. The standardised language, called Rumantsch Grischun, has been slowly accepted[citation needed]. On the orthographic level, Schmid sought to avoid all "odd-looking" spellings, in order to increase general acceptability of the new idiom and its spelling. Therefore, words with /t?/ followed by /a/, /o/, /u/ have <ch> (for example chalanda) as both speakers of Engadin (chalanda) and the Rhine territory (calanda) expect a spelling with <c>. However, <che> and <chi> are pronounced /ke/ and /ki/, <k> being a grapheme deemed unfit for a Romance language such as Romansh; therefore, words with /t?/ plus /e/ or /i/ have <tg> (for example tgirar) instead of <ch>. The use of <sch> for both /?/ and /?/, and of <tsch> for /t?/ is taken over from German, making Romansh spelling a compromise between Romance (Italian, French) and German spelling.
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