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Romansh
Last update: Saturday 11th of February 2012
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| Romansh Rumantsch | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Switzerland, Italy | |
| Region: | Graubünden | |
| Total speakers: | 50,000–70,000 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Italic Romance Italo-Western Western Romance Gallo-Iberian Gallo-Romance Gallo-Rhaetian Romansh | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | Switzerland | |
| Regulated by: | no official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | rm | |
| ISO 639-2: | roh | |
| ISO 639-3: | roh | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Romansh (also spelled Rumantsch, Romansch or Romanche) is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French. It is one of the three Rhaeto-Romance languages, believed to have descended from the Vulgar Latin variety spoken by Roman era occupiers of the region, and, as such, somewhat resembles Italian, French, Spanish and Catalan. It is spoken by about 50,000-70,000 people in the canton of Graubünden (Grisons), of which about 35,000 speak it as their first language. Spoken by fewer than 1% of Switzerland's 7.4 million inhabitants, it is the smallest of Switzerland's national languages in terms of number of speakers, about half the size of Switzerland's largest community of speakers of non-official languages (Serbo-Croatian), with some 111,000 speakers.