The Röstigraben and the Polentagraben: Switzerland’s Regional Language Differences

I’ve often gotten asked if I speak German, as I live in Switzerland. Even by other people in Europe.

Most people do not know that Switzerland has four national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansch. According to 2021 statistics from the Swiss Federal Council, the population-to-language breakdown looks like the chart I created for this post.

Switzerland’s Regional Language Differences

I live in what’s called “Romandie” or the Suisse Romande,” which means I live in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I speak English (my native language) and French (though nowhere nearly as well as English).

What language people in Switzerland speak varies depending on the region.

This creates a weird disorientation when you get on a train with everything around you in French, from signs to conversations, and then get off the train less than an hour later with everything around you in German (or Italian).

The Röstigraben and the Polentagraben

There’s no official border or demarcation between different language zones. At one point or another, it just changes.

This point—or, rather, these points—do have colloquial names, however.

The term for the unofficial border between German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland, coined back in World War I by journalists seeking to show how loyalty to different sides during the war seemed to fall along language lines, is the “röstigraben,”or the rösti border. (Rösti is a Swiss-German dish made from melted cheese, shredded potatoes, and sometimes meat.)

Much later, and with less success in terms of catching on, people coined the term “polentagraben” to define the border between the Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland and the German- and French-speaking regions. (The term references polenta,, the Italian cornmeal dish.)

To Each Region its Languages—and its Cultures

Though people in one Swiss region take classes in another Swiss official language while in school, they don’t typically increase their understanding of it beyond the curriculum-required bare minimum and they tend to forget it as soon as their school days are over.

In general, Swiss-Germans speak different dialects of Swiss-German (and high German), Swiss-Italians speak Italian, and Swiss-Romands speak French. If these groups need to communicate with each other, they usually default to English—a language that, due to its global utility, most Swiss people try to understand and speak at least at a baseline level.

Each region preserves differences far deeper than their languages, though. Switzerland is rich in cultures and customs of all kinds, with each linguistic region having certain common grounds that even split further between different subregions within the same language.

And as you can imagine, people in one subculture have set notions—dare we say prejudices?—about people in other subcultures, as people do in countries all across the globe about other countries (and even about different regions within their own). But I won’t go down that dangerous rabbit hole to share what I’ve heard here!

Don’t Assume Everyone in Switzerland Speaks the Same Language

So there you have it: I live on the French-speaking side of the röstigraben, in Swiss Romandie. And I do not speak German.

This inability to speak German combined with the assumption that people in Switzerland speak German results in endless frustration—for me and for everyone else in Switzerland who speaks one of the other official languages—when websites and advertisements geolocate you in the country and then pump nonsense at you in a language you cannot understand.

If I need to submit to advertising, may it at least come through comprehensibly. (Or go ahead and waste your money, advertisers, that’s on you.) But the worst is when I’m on a website for necessary information or to make a purchase and the website so egregiously fails me with its assumptions.

With the magic of all the information on the internet, how haven’t companies figured it out by now? And yet!