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Information AboutRomansh Language |
Romansh (also spelled '''Rumantsch''', '''Romansch''' or '''Romanche''') is one of the four national languages of Switzerland , along with German , Italian and French . It is a Romance Language , believed to have descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken by Roman Era occupiers of the region, and, as such, somewhat resembles Italian and French. It is spoken by around 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 a non-official language, Serbo-Croatian with some 111,000 speakers. SOCIOLINGUISTICS Romansh is not a single language but a group of closely-related , spoken by around 500,000-600,000 people in the northeast, and Ladin , spoken by some 20,000 in the Dolomite mountains of the Italian Tyrol. The five largest languages in the Romansh family are ''Sursilvan'', ''Sutsilvan'', ''Surmiran'', ''Puter'' and ''Vallader''. ''Puter'' and ''Vallader'' are sometimes considered one language: ''Ladin''. Ladin is sometimes associated with the language in Italy's Dolomite mountains also known as Ladin . The ISO 639 language codes are rm and roh.STANDARDISATION Romansh was standardised in 1982 by Zürich -based linguist Heinrich Schmid . The standardised language, called Rumantsch Grischun, has not been very well accepted, and speakers of the different dialects tend to address one another in German . This is leading to an acceleration of the decline of the language. 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 followed by , , have The ''Lia Rumantscha'' is the Umbrella Organization for all Romansh associations. Its web site provides further background information. LITERATURE :''See Swiss Literature#Romansch And Ladin Branch The emergence of Romansh as a literary language is generally dated to the mid-16th century. PHONOLOGY Consonants The Consonant Phoneme s of Romansh (Rumantsch Grischun) are set out in the following chart: Vowels The vowel phonemes of Romansh are shown in the table below: Schwa occurs only in Unstressed Syllable s. Vowel Length is predictable:
SOME COMMON EXPRESSIONS allegra - hello co vai? - how are you? fa plaschair - pleased to meet you bun di - good morning buna saira - good evening buna notg - good night a revair - goodbye a pli tard - see you later perstgisai - I beg your pardon i ma displascha - I'm sorry perdunai - excuse me per plaschair - please grazia fitg - thank you very much anzi - you're welcome gratulazions - congratulations bun cletg - good luck ils quants è oz? - what's the date today? quants onns has ti? - how old are you? EXTERNAL LINKS
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