Standing in the railway station at Klosters, you find yourself in the middle of traditional, German-speaking Switzerland.  The famous holiday town lies in a beautiful valley, surrounded by snow-capped Alps.  The inhabitants speak to each other using a unique local dialect of German – a strange manner of speaking which even the Germans themselves don’t easily understand. Klosters is a living version of the typical, picture postcard Switzerland.

From Klosters you can travel by train through the Vereina Tunnel, which runs through the vast bulk of several mountains and into the neighbouring Lower Engadine valley.  When the train finally appears, blinking, in the Engadine sunshine, a newcomer to these parts would need a few minutes to realise that he has been carried into a different world. As the train slows down and halts outside the first tiny village, the countryside is just as beautiful as on the other side of the mountain, but somehow something has changed.

There is an announcement from the train driver. The passengers look around in confusion.  What did he just say? Presumably that the train is stopping here, but his words don’t belong to any well-known languages.  Was he using some kind of strange German dialect?  It seems not, because he was speaking with an almost Italian accent. Is it possible then, that he was actually speaking Italian? It would be easy to believe that.

However, that would be a serious mistake, because in fact the man was speaking a completely different language; Romansh. Romansh is one of the three so-called Rhaeto-Romance languages, which evolved from the Vulgar Latin which was spoken in Central Europe during the Roman Empire.  When it is written, the language often looks like a strange fusion of German and Italian.  People often joke that Romansh resembles Italian, pronounced by a drunken German.  Today it is the fourth official language of Switzerland, spoken by approximately 70 000 people in the Swiss canton of Graubuenden.  That kind of official recognition is a big success for such a little language. There are actually more people in the world who speak Esperanto than who speak Romansh!

In fact, to describe Romansh as one language is somewhat imprecise, because the language actually consists of at least four different dialects:  Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Sumirana and Ladin, which itself consist of two dialects. These are spoken in the Engadine valley. Graubuenden is a very mountainous canton, and even these days it isn’t easy to travel from village to village, especially during the long, snowy winters.  Before the railway was constructed, communication was even more difficult and because of that so many dialects developed.  Although speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another one fairly well, many Romansh words are completely different, depending on which valley you are in. For example the word “cup” can be scadiola, scariola, cuppegn, coppa or cuppina!

This means there is thus a lack of unity in the Romansh speaking regions.  In order to solve this problem, a skilled linguist called Heinrich Schmid decided in 1982 to standardise the language.  He effectively created a new language, which he called “Rumantsch Grischun” and intended Romansh-speaking Swiss to use when chatting to speakers of other dialects.  However, the idea was not popular with normal people and these days it exists mainly as a written language.  The Swiss government, for example, uses Rumantsch Grischun in its official Romansh correspondence.

Many people are concerned about the conservation of the language and afraid that it could die out, as a result of the growing migration of the local population to the richer German speaking towns of the canton.  For this reason, people enthusiastically publish Romansh books and newspapers, create Romansh speaking radio stations, and use the language for teaching children at school.  Tourists who already fluently speak German even have the possibility to attend special courses, which introduce the history and grammar of Romansh. However, to see that Romansh is still alive, you just need to take a stroll through the Engadine.

If you leave the train at the first stop, you can walk on a path along the side of the mountains.  After an hour you reach Guarda, a beautiful village which perches dangerously on the edge of a rocky ledge.  Beautiful pictures are painted on the white plaster of the tiny old houses which line the narrow main street.  Some of them show colourful birds and animals, others show in detail stories from the Bible or local history.  Little phrases in Romansh are engraved beneath them, whether they are poems or prayers is not known.  Romansh speaking children run barefoot in the streets, while their sunburned mothers stand in the main square, washing their clothes in the water fountains and talking rapidly in an incomprehensible language. “Allegra”, they say friendlily to the passing tourists.

 It seems incredible that you could travel 20 kilometres through a tunnel and arrive in a modern Germanic town. It seems incredible that you are actually situated in one of the richest countries in the world, a country of banks and high finance. You feel as if you have just entered a century gone by.  The Lower Engadine really is a remarkable place; a valley forgotten by time, with its own secret language. It’s well worth a visit! Here are a few expressions which you might hear there.

Allegra!- Hello!

Co vai? – How are you?

Bun di – Good morning

Buna saira – Good evening

Buna notg – Good night

Jau hai num… – My name is…

Co avais vus num? -  What is your name?

A revair! – Goodbye!

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