Sacha’s Weblog

1.2b people speak Mandarin, 422m speak Arabic, 366m speak Hindi, 322 speak Spanish.

Anyway, this summer, I decided to learn a new language and took my first Rumantsch class, the fourth official Swiss language, spoken by an impressive 61,815 persons last time the government checked in 2000 (count me in now, that’s 61,816).

To be totally accurate, the so called Rumantsch language (or Rhéto-Romanche), is split in … five quite different idioms. The one I’m learning is called Surmiran, spoken by about 2,200 persons. My résumé will really be  unique now.

Onward,

Sacha

P.S.: Before you call on my sanity, you might want to know that my wife speaks Rumantsch very fluently (it is her mother’s mother tongue) and that we spend quite a decent amount of time every year in the part of the Alps where this language is spoken. I’d call that “social integration”