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Swiss French

Swiss French (French: français de Suisse or suisse romand) is the variety of French spoken in the French-speaking area of Switzerland known as Romandy. French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland, the others being German, Italian, and Romansch. In 2020 around 2 million people, or 22.8% of the population, in Switzerland spoke French as their primary language, and 28% of the population used French most often at work.[1]

Not to be confused with Swiss migration to France or Swiss French people.

The French spoken in Switzerland is very similar to that of France or Belgium. The differences between the French of Switzerland and of France are mostly lexical, influenced by local substrate languages. This contrasts with the differences between Standard German and Swiss German, which are largely mutually unintelligible.


Swiss French is characterized by some terms adopted from Arpitan, which was formerly spoken widely across the alpine communities of Romandy, but has far fewer speakers today. In addition, some expressions have been borrowed from both Swiss and Standard German. Although a standard form of French is taught in schools and used in the government, the media and business, there is no uniform vernacular form of French among the different cantons of Switzerland. For example, some German terms in regions bordering German-speaking communities are completely unused in the area around Geneva, a city by France's border with Switzerland.[2]

The nasal vowels are pronounced like in France. /ɑ̃/[ɒ̃], /ɛ̃/[æ̃], /ɔ̃/[õ]. Conversely, the nasal vowels /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/ are kept separate in much Swiss French speech, where much has merged them. For example, brin (stalk) and brun (brown) are still pronounced differently, like in Quebec and Belgium, unlike in Paris.[3]

speech in France

As in Belgium, the distinction between the vowels /ɛ/ and /ɛː/ is maintained in Switzerland, but they have merged in France. For example, mettre (put) and maître (master) are still pronounced differently, unlike in France.

The distinction between mid vowels /o/ and /ɔ/ has also been maintained in final open syllables, as well as that between /e/ and /ɛ/. For example, peau (skin) and pot (jar) are still pronounced differently, unlike in France and Quebec. For that reason, entré (entered; past participle of the verb entrer) and entrait (third-person singular of entrer in the imperfect indicative) are differentiated, just like in Standard French.

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Demographics of Switzerland

Linguistic geography of Switzerland

Swiss German

Swiss Italian

compiled by Mathieu Avanzi, Marie-José Béguelin, Gilles Corminboeuf, Federica Diémoz and Laure Anne Johnsen. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.

French (Swiss) DoReCo corpus