When a Romanian, an Italian and a French walk into a Romansh bar...

[Ogrim]

OK, sorry for the click-bait title, it is not exactly a bar, but a video by Ecolinguist on YouTube, which shows how well a French, an Italian and a Romanian speaker understand the Romansh language (more specifically the Sursilvan idiom). As you don't hear much Romansh anywhere, I thought this may be of interest for those who learn Romance languages.



By the way, the writing "Romansch· is wrong in any language, in English it is Romansh, and in Romansh it is either "Romontsch" or "Rumantsch·.

[Le Baron]

I just watched 15 minutes of this until it dawned on me that I watched it in April! No matter, I still enjoyed it. Romanian is a closed book to me. Someone said the comments said Romansh sounds like a Roman Legionnaire who got lost in the German woods for 30 years.

[mick33]

Very interesting! I've only heard Romansh once before, and I think it was in a song. To my ears Romansh sounds sort of like Romanian without the Slavic influences, but I understood very little of it. I was surprised that I could understand some of the French even though I don't really know French.

[Iversen]

I can already understand three of those languages - and as soon as as I looked at the transcription I could almost also understand the fourth one, but I lack a lot of very common words (that a stone should be "crap" is a bit surprising). So a couple of weeks with a dictionary and I should be OK. The pronunciation is not a problem - the orthography is weird, but seems to be fairly consistent.

The last time I heard a bit of Romansh was during a TV program about a Swiss touristical train, where the traveller descended somewhere (Chur?) to attend a class in a school where the local variant was taught - but the burning question is whether there still will be any native speakers one generation from now, or whether it will become a language learnt for fun by a small group of adults.

[Ogrim]

I just watched 15 minutes of this until it dawned on me that I watched it in April! No matter, I still enjoyed it. Romanian is a closed book to me. Someone said the comments said Romansh sounds like a Roman Legionnaire who got lost in the German woods for 30 years.

There is a grain of truth in that. Many of the particularities in Romansh, both in phonetics and vocabulary, are a result of Germanic influence. Although Romansh survived because it was not spoken in the woods, but in the valleys of the Swiss alps where people lived isolated for centuries. That isolation also explains why there are numerous Romansh dialects and five "idioms" with their own written standard. Not bad for a language spoken by approximately 50 000 people!

I can already understand three of those languages - and as soon as as I looked at the transcription I could almost also understand the fourth one, but I lack a lot of very common words (that a stone should be "crap" is a bit surprising). So a couple of weeks with a dictionary and I should be OK. The pronunciation is not a problem - the orthography is weird, but seems to be fairly consistent.

The last time I heard a bit of Romansh was during a TV program about a Swiss touristical train, where the traveller descended somewhere (Chur?) to attend a class in a school where the local variant was taught - but the burning question is whether there still will be any native speakers one generation from now, or whether it will become a language learnt for fun by a small group of adults.

Although Romansh vocabulary is overwhelmingly Romance, a lot of everyday words come from Germanic dialects, (although "crap" apparently is of Celtic origin). In some cases German words have totally replaced the Romance ones, like "aber" for "but". In other cases they have chosen "less common" alternative words from Latin, eg to hear is "tedlar" which comes from Latin TITULARE - to name (something), or "tunar" (to sound), from Latin TONARE (which has given French "tonner" (to thunder). All this makes Romansh less transparent compared to other Romance languages.

Romansh is not in a very good place, but it has still more chance of surviving longer than many other minority languages, thanks to the efforts made by Switzerland and the Kanton of Graubünden to keep the language alive. I think there still will be native speakers in a generation, but I am also afraid that over time less and less people will speak it on a daily basis and it will become an "artificial curiosity" kept alive as some sort of folkloric symbol of "Swissness". On the other hand, native speakers keep on producing music and literature in the language, which clearly contributes to its continued existence.