One feature of Switzerland is the fact that it is multilingual. There are four official national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. If you grow up in Switzerland, you learn two of these languages in school. In everyday life people just usually use their mother tongue. There is a big difference in the percentage of people who speak each language:

• 62.6% of the resident population speak German as their main language,
• 22.9% speak French,
• 8.2% speak Italian (including immigrants living in Switzerland),
• and 0.5% speak Romansh.

The non-Swiss residential population also contribute to the linguistic diversity: 24.3% speak a different main language to the four Swiss national languages. 18.5% of the population speaks more than one main language. (Source: Swiss Federal Statistical Office, as at 2013).