# French-German-Italian(-Romansch) databases?



## alisonp

Given all the work that Canada's Office québécois de la langue française and Bureau de la traduction do on trying to produce French/English terminology databases for a bilingual country, I'm surprised that there doesn't appear to be anything similar for the four official languages of Switzerland.  Are four different languages too difficult to manage, is the will not there, or am I missing out on some wonderful database somewhere that I know nothing about?


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## Angel.Aura

Hi alisonp,
So far I only was able to find a historical dictionary of Switzerland, a trilingual one (Italian, French, German).
And it's not completed yet.
Here's the link.


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## sokol

It's not that the languages were too different but that the four language communities (mostly) keep to themselves.

There are several descriptions of Swiss German (mostly dialects as they're considered very important there; begin your Google search with _Schweizer Idiotikon_), there are sociolinguistic surveys of the Rumuntsch situation in Graubünden (Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact and others), as for the Italian situation I am not very well informed (though in it's language significantly different from Italy it seems that Ticino, concerning language, mostly orientates itself on Italy), and as for the French speaking Romandie I'd guess that they do not attribute great importance to the local variety of the spoken French there.


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## SwissMarie

sokol said:


> It's not that the languages were too different but that the four language communities (mostly) keep to themselves.


I confirm this... 
The language situation in Switzerland is a very complex one. Each linguistic region has its own specific language situation, depending both on the economical/political position of the linguistic community within Switzerland and the position of the linguistic community within its wider linguistic community of reference. Three regions can be considered diglossic: the German-speaking part (Swiss-German/German diglossia), the Romantsch-speaking part (Romantsch/(Swiss-)German diglossia) and the Italian-speaking part (Ticino dialect/Italian diglossia). The situation is different in the French-speaking part. There were romance dialects (of "Franco-provençal" type) spoken here but they have completely died out and the situation is therefore not diglossic (we speak French with just a few local words). One of the points about Switzerland that may not be obvious to foreigners is that Swiss multilingualism does not imply multilingual individuals or a multilingual society. The country is rather made of several mainly monolingual regions. Officially, though, individual multilingualism is strongly encouraged, but the power and identity issues at stake are so acute that individual multilingualism remains limited.
I realise this does not really answer Alison's question (sorry!), but maybe it can provide a rough picture of the background.


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## alisonp

Thank you very much for the replies, which I've only just noticed.  Very interesting, but obviously the wished-for database is only going to be a pipedream.

Oh well ...


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## PHN

Is there good addresses on the internet where somebody can learn 
at least one variant of swiss-german 
or at least one variant of (retho-) romanche ?


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## tilman

I am not at all sure if this is relevant to this thread but LEO has recently opened a German-Italian-German dictionary. Thus, LEO has now the following dictionaries: German-English-German, German-French-German, German-Italian-German (and additionally German-Spanish-German and German-Chinese-German).

The address: http [those things but no www] dict [dot] leo [dot] org
(Wordreference forbids the posting of internet addresses)

Another point, which MIGHT be relevant to somebody: There is a site from Finland, which provides translations between MANY languages (including German, French, and Italian). The site is in Finnish so you probably don't understand it - but it might not matter too much, as there is a field on top of the site  Just write your word in any language, so it gives you translations of the word in many languages  Address: www [dot] sanakirja [dot] org

Greetings,

Tilman


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## alisonp

Thanks for that, Tilman. BTW, WordRef will allow you to post links, but only once you get to 30 posts, which you're still a little away from.

Edit: here's the usable link: http://www.sanakirja.org/


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