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Romansh ) is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French. It is a Romance language, believed to have descended from the vulgar Latin spoken by Roman era occupiers of the region, and, as such, somewhat resembles Italian and French. It is spoken by around 50,000-70,000 people in the canton of Graubünden (Grisons), of which about 35,000 speak it as their first language. Spoken by fewer than 1% of Switzerland's 7.4 million inhabitants, it is the smallest of Switzerland's national languages in terms of number of speakers, about half the size of Switzerland's largest community of speakers of a non-official language, Serbo-Croatian with some 111,000 speakers.

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Romansh is not a single language but a group of closely-related languages or dialects, all belonging to the family of the Rhaetian languages. The group of various Rhaetian languages spoken in Switzerland is termed Romansh; the other members of the group are from northern Italy: Friulian, spoken by around 500,000-600,000 people in the northeast, and Ladin, spoken by some 20,000 in the Dolomite mountains of the Italian Tyrol.

The five largest languages in the Romansh family are i. Ladin is sometimes associated with the language in Italy's Dolomite mountains also known as Ladin. The ISO 639 language codes are code

Romansh was standardized in 1982 by Zürich-based linguist Heinrich Schmid. The standardized language, called b, has not been very well accepted, and speakers of the different dialects tend to address one another in German. This is leading to an acceleration of the decline of the language. On the orthographic level, Schmid sought to avoid all "odd-looking" spellings, in order to increase general acceptability of the new idiom and its spelling. Therefore, words with span title="Pronunciation in IPA" ) expect a spelling with <c>. However, <che> and <chi> are pronounced span title="Pronunciation in IPA" , <k> being a grapheme deemed unfit for a Romance language such as Romansh; therefore, words with span title="Pronunciation in IPA" is taken over from German, making Romansh spelling a compromise between Romance (Italian, French) and German spelling.

The i is the umbrella organization for all Romansh associations. Its web site provides further background information.

The consonant phonemes of Romansh (Rumantsch Grischun) are set out in the following chart:

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allegra - hello

co vai? - how are you?

fa plaschair - pleased to meet you

bun di - good morning

buna saira - good evening

buna notg - good night

a revair - goodbye

a pli tard - see you later

perstgisai - I beg your pardon

i ma displascha - I'm sorry

perdunai - excuse me

per plaschair - please

grazia fitg - thank you very much

anzi - your welcome

gratulazions - congratulations

bun cletg - good luck

ils quants è oz? - what's the date today?

quants onns has ti? - how old are you?