Swiss French

Swiss French, called francais de Suisse or francais romand, is the variety of French spoken in Romandy, the French speaking part of Switzerland, one of the country's four official languages alongside German, Italian, and Romansh. About 2.1 million native speakers lived in Romandy in 2020, close to 22.8 percent of the Swiss population, with a further 28 percent using French regularly at work. It remains mutually intelligible with the French of France, and its differences from Metropolitan French show up mainly in vocabulary, shaped by local substrate languages including historical Arpitan influence and German loanwords, especially near the language border. Phonologically it preserves some distinctions lost in Parisian French, keeping the nasal vowels written in and un separate, maintaining the contrast between short and long e sounds, and holding onto stronger long and short vowel distinctions, including the pronunciation of feminine adjective endings. No single uniform vernacular covers all of Romandy, and usage varies by canton, with Geneva speech differing noticeably from that of areas bordering German speaking Switzerland.