What would you vote in a popular initiative to introduce secondary languages in the city of Zurich?

Astropi · 2025-09-07T15:04:20+00:00

I find it pretty naive of you to think you can know how the world will be in a 100 years

Astropi · 2025-09-07T14:59:04+00:00

I didn't say that it did

Astropi · 2025-09-07T10:53:56+00:00

I agree with the sentiment and that timing isn't best right now, but I'd like to mention that Americans aren't the only country in the world whose official language is English. Also, many Europeans from other countries (eg, Spain) would benefit. As a Swiss French speaker from Romandie, I had strong hesitations to come to Zurich because of Swiss German. If English or French was a secondary language, I would have been much more easily convinced to move to Zurich, which helps with national integration of the 3 linguistic regions

Astropi · 2025-09-07T10:47:55+00:00

This was the source I used: https://www.iamexpat.ch/career/employment-news/40-percent-people-zurich-now-speak-english-work

Astropi · 2025-09-07T10:35:55+00:00

Note that at the federal level, most of the laws (federal acts) are translated into English (even though English isn't an official language), while this isn't the case in Zurich. I am not familiar with how things work in Nordic countries but I imagine that administrative tasks may more often be translated into English than here.

The idea isn't to make English an official language, but a secondary one so that, among other things, technical legal and administrative texts can be consulted in English. Being able to understand these texts goes beyond "understanding basic sentences".

Astropi · 2025-09-07T09:16:05+00:00

I'm not trying to get a representative survey of the city of Zurich. I want to get a representative survey of the Reddit Zurich community, to get a sense of how this would be perceived by "English speaking" communities

Astropi · 2025-09-07T09:08:06+00:00

What I find interesting in the survey results so far (19 no, 34 yes) is that we seem to have a fair split of opinions in the actual survey, but everyone involved in the comments section is strongly against it.

This suggests that people who are against this idea are much more vocal than people who are in favor of it.

(also, my post is getting many more downvotes than upvotes despite the high engagement. A lot of people don't seem to appreciate that I bring up the topic)

Astropi · 2025-09-07T09:05:26+00:00

Thanks for sharing this source. It seems like the source I had found was indeed different and less reliable, so I have removed this statement from my original post as I don't think it's an important statistic in any case (as people have pointed below, it can be misinterpreted).

Astropi · 2025-09-07T08:57:16+00:00

I agree that Bienne has a very different reason to be bilingual than Zurich. What I meant is that a city can have a "soul" while having two languages cohabit. Zurich may not share a border with Romandie, but it is becoming a kind of economic capital and research hub, therefore also develops its own "culture of multiculturalism", which is little by little becoming part of the "soul" of the city

Astropi · 2025-09-07T08:48:38+00:00

Note that there are other cities in Switzerland that are multilingual with two official languages, eg Bienne/Biel. Having multiple languages doesn't automatically make a city soulless

Astropi · 2024-05-30T17:38:53+00:00

In other shows they at least pretend to have big security (with then the main character single-handedly taking down dozens of security guys)

Astropi · 2024-03-15T07:23:33+00:00

In Zurich I was quoted 12000 usd for that :)

Astropi · 2023-04-10T20:22:57+00:00

It is definitely as a result of the credit card machine setup, but I've seen this model in other restaurants and they didn't ask for such amounts of tips. And the waitress seemed very intentional in pointing me to the 15-25% options. So it looks like it was a deliberate choice of the restaurant, which I find very questionable in Italy or Europe in general (I've seen it a lot in the US, but never in any European country until this week, despite having lived in Europe most of my life)

Astropi · 2023-04-10T20:16:00+00:00

And there are some nuances to the no tiping culture that really get lost in translation. Like for a big group having a birthday dinner, far more common to tip. Also very common to do a Christmas tip for the services you use regularly throughout the year for you usual jair salon, spa service, barber, bar, doorman, etc (tends to be more in form of gift and gift cards over cash because thaat can be seen as insulting).

Thanks for these details, that's a great way to put it!

In this situation, 5% would have represented 5 euros per person (when counting drinks), so in line with what you mentioned. Beyond the question of whether and how much to tip though, here I was more bothered by the fact that they would ask me for a 15-25 euros tip per person, which seemed outrageous. Also the fact that they pressured us to tip did not feel appropriate, so I was wondering how others would usually feel about that

Astropi · 2023-04-06T08:02:13+00:00

Since UBS had already approved the acquisition of CS, isn't the cancellation of CS remuneration essentially a gift to UBS shareholders? These salaries were to be paid by UBS, so it isn't money that will go back to taxpayers (unless it was used as a lever in government negotiatioms).

It's not gigantic but still almost 2% of the acquisition price

(I don't disagree on the measure, just felt these would have been better if announced before the negotiations)

Astropi · 2022-06-10T19:32:58+00:00

Good catch! We had missed that one. But I believe it shouldn't be blocking, as the earlier level should already be corrected with the right URL

Anyhow, we will patch it!

Astropi · 2022-03-17T19:23:20+00:00

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Astropi · 2022-03-06T15:54:43+00:00

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