thisisnottaken1
Full Member
I didn’t even know that he was Swiss nor that he now plays for the Gambia. I remember when he played for us his country was England, I’m pretty sure. I did look up statistics on native languages in Switzerland, and a majority, rather than just a plurality, of people in Switzerland do indeed speak German (over 60% according to the Swiss government website), however I didn’t include it because I did not know that Janko played for Switzerland (and even then, he only played for their under-21s, which doesn’t really count IMO; one wouldn’t really count Jamal Musiala as English even though he played for England up to and including under 21 level because he plays for Germany at senior level) and because of Switzerland’s multilingual nature, with the fact that French and Italian are also official languages, as well as Romansh. In the case of Germany and Austria, German is the sole official language and is spoken by a much wider percentage of the population. According to a 2019 survey of Swiss people, 38% regularly use two languages.Saidy Janko?
Born and grew up in Switzerland (majority German speaking). played in the infamous 4-0 defeat to MK Dons in the League Cup. He represents The Gambia now, but was playing for Switzerland U21s while at United.
TL;DR: Switzerland, despite being part of the Germanosphere and being a country in which the majority of people (though not a large majority, although by some definitions a supermajority) speak German, wasn’t included because it is also part of the French and Italian speaking worlds, and Swiss children are expected to learn another one of the country’s languages depending on their native one, whereas with German and Austrian children, the only language they will use in regular conversation is German (both dialectal and standard), and will learn foreign languages (especially English) but will not use it in regular conversation. As a Scottish person myself, a lot of this is based on Google Searches and educated guesses, so it might not be entirely accurate.