I wondered if any one could help me. My husband has been offered a job in Zug but we wanted to the children to go to a French speaking school. Does anyone know the closest area to Zug that is Fren ch speaking and not ghostly quiet! Any help would be very much appreciated
many thanks
Rachel

The "Roestigraben" divides german and french speaking Switzerland and you can see it on this site http://www.mapserver.ch/en/gallery.htm if you click on the second map down "geopolitics", because aside from language the politics are much different too.

Basically you need to go to Freiburg or past Bern to get to the french speaking region in the west, so probably not a practical commute to a french school.

PS Why do you want them to learn french rather than german?

Daniel

I was going to ask this exact same question. In fact, they could learn German, French and Italian all together in and around Zug, especially given nearly every consumer product and document is printed in D/F/I. French and Italian speaking parts of Switzerland are only a couple of hours away by train.

Really the question should be: what language do your children want to learn?

Thank you so much for your help in this . I think you are right not really commutable. Its not that I prefer them to learn French it is just we have moved around alot , My husband is Dutch and our six year old has had 5 schools in his short career He just spent a very tough year in France at a local school and is now fairly fluent so all I am looking for is a little continuity. You say it is possible for them to learn French but none of the international schools around Zug offer French until much older by which time he will probably have forgotten what he knows. I don't know maybe I am just being too picky and they do say that children at this age are very adaptable but I don't want to push them too far. I guess I am just not looking forward to the conversation about new country, new language!
thanks again
RX

I know the OP probably has all the info she needs but in case anyone is searching for this topic in the future, I found a really helpful map that shows the different language parts of Switzerland from the 2000 census...

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Im...nguages_CH.png

Very useful. It really is amazing how few bilingual areas there are between french and german.

Daniel

There is always the French International school in Zurich (Lycée Français de Zurich) http://www.lfz.ch/