Chur, the capital of the Grisons, was devastated by fire in the fifteenth century. An influx of German-speaking workers arrived to help with reconstruction, and the town’s language altered to German before Romansh had established a literary tradition. And the fact that wider political authority was decentralized meant that linguistic fragmentation found little resistance. Until the start of the nineteenth century, the canton was governed by three bodies with names fit for a Wes Anderson caper: the League of God’s House, the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, and the Gray League. During the Reformation, villagers could put big questions—whether to turn Protestant or remain Catholic—to a vote. Among the surviving Romansh idioms, Sursilvan reigns in the upper Rhine Valley; Sutsilvan in the posterior Rhine Valley; Surmiran in the Albula Valley and Oberhalbstein; and Puter and Vallader in the Engadine. In Cathomas’s estimation, Sursilvan accounts for just over half of all Romansh speakers, Vallader about a fifth, Puter and Surmiran each about ten per cent, and Sutsilvan about five per cent. (These five idioms, Cathomas notes, are themselves a standardization of perhaps twenty-one linguistic varieties that arose over time.) Greetings shift on either side of a watershed and can vary even within a town. Among speakers of Romansh, you could find dozens of ways of pronouncing the first-person pronoun. “Avalanche” varies, too—lavina in Sursilvan, Vallader, and Puter, lavegna in Surmiran and Sutsilvan. With both courtesies and catastrophes refusing to conform, the canton’s school board, publishers, and clergy were forced to produce multiple editions of primers, textbooks, and catechisms; sometimes five parallel print runs were needed for a population the size of a town. To the reform-minded, it was plain that something had to give.
I met Bernard Cathomas at his home in Chur, a white-walled modernist house designed in the style of Rudolf Olgiati, the Swiss architect known for making starkness feel Alpine. Tall and slender, with retreating white hair, rimless glasses, and a careful, though not unamused, expression, Cathomas carried himself with the formality of a cultural functionary and the low-key stubbornness of a man who has spent a lifetime defending a fragile language. He remains better known in the valleys of the Grisons than he might like; his name can still provoke sharp opinions. The death threats have passed. The indignation has not.
Inside, we sat by some Le Corbusier armchairs—“Not always very comfortable,” he remarked—while his wife, Rita, brought out what felt like a culinary tour of the valleys: a barley soup dense with grains and vegetables, grated potatoes fried slowly in butter until crisp, and plates of charn setga dal Grischun, dried meats from the Grisons. Cathomas was born in 1946 in Breil, a village situated on a terrace on the north side of the Anterior Rhine, forty-two hundred feet above sea level. He was the second of fourteen children, in a Sursilvan-speaking family.
The family straddled eras: their habits belonged to the region’s past, their livelihood to the new era. His father worked as a wheelwright until rubber tires killed the trade, then built wooden molds to cast concrete for hydroelectric projects. “My first and deepest wish was to become a medical doctor,” Cathomas said, “but, because my family lacked the money for a secondary-school education, I gave up on that idea.” In the mid-fifties, the family visited the Benedictine monastery at Disentis, which operated a school. Cathomas recalls standing in the Baroque church, beneath a fresco of St. Placidus carrying his own severed head, while monks asked his father if they could pay for tuition. They could not. Nor did Bernard have any desire to be a priest or a monk. He stayed in his local school, trained as a teacher in Chur, and eventually earned a doctorate in German studies.
By the seventies, Romansh was losing ground; although the number of speakers inched up, the share of the Swiss population who spoke it shrank. German seeped into daily speech, bringing its gadgets with it: vacuum cleaners were schtaubsugers, televisions fernseers, tents zeltas. Decline had a ratchet effect. “Languages need what we call in economics ‘network externality,’ ” Clemens Sialm, a finance professor at the University of Texas who grew up speaking Romansh, told me. “A language becomes more useful the more people speak it.” In the early eighties, someone suggested to Cathomas that Romansh should be allowed to “die in beauty”—the proposal itself phrased, with a touch of fatalist elegance, in Vallader.
