Romansh people though with ever-increasing sovereignty and recognition at the federal level to the point that Romansh is now considered one of the official federal languages of the Swiss Confederation. The Romansh national leadership in Switzerland expressly stated its interest in Switzerland joining the European Union in terms of a pro-European stance and not an anti-Swiss-Confederation one, openly recognizing that the Confederation, though dominated by the German Swiss and with large Swiss French and Swiss Italian contingents, had sheltered the tiny Romansh minority population for nearly 200 years, never engaging in programs to erase their identity or language nor forcing them to
Romansh language translation of German 'einen Korb geben', literally meaning 'to hand a basket', but used in the sense of 'turning down a marriage proposal' or "esser ligiongia ad enzatgi", a loan translation of the German expression "jemandem Wurst sein", literally meaning 'to be sausage to someone' but meaning 'not cared about, to be unimportant'. Apart from vocabulary, the influence of German is noticeable in grammatical constructions, which are sometimes closer to German than to other Romance languages. For instance, Romansh is the only Romance language in which indirect speech is formed using the subjunctive mood, as in Sursilvan "El di ch'el