In the News

English Most Useful

A National Science Foundation Study in 2008 found a majority of Swiss believing that English is the most useful foreign language in the country, although it is not Switzerland's lingua franca as commonly believed.

The most frequently cited foreign languages in the study are French and German. English fails to come out in top position in any of the country's linguistic regions. However, if you ask people which foreign language they consider to be the most useful, more than eight out of ten say English. In the German-speaking part of the country, this figure is even higher than nine out of ten. Italian might even be considered to be a threatened language, according to the study's authors. English comes across as the most prestigious language for the Swiss, ahead of French, German and Spanish.