• Skua@kbin.earth
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 days ago

    It’s one of the more reasonable formables too, I suppose, given Switzerland’s whole existing multi-ethnic federation deal

    I got curious as to what its demographics would be like. Assumptions made here are:

    • People from Italy are all counted as Italians, from France as French, from Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein as Germans. I know ethnicities and languages get very blurry at the borders even before you account for migration, but I am looking for a rough idea here
    • People from Switzerland are grouped into one of those three according to language or placed into the “Other” category (particularly notable for Switzerland’s fourth official language, Romansh)
    • People from Slovenia are also in the “Other” category

    With that, our Alpine Confederation here has a population of 30.87 million and the proportions of the three big languages is reversed. It’s 37.8% Italians, 34.4% French, 24.5% Germans, and 3.4% others. This population would take Switzerland from being the 22nd most-populous state in Europe to the 10th, just behind Poland. Italy would become less populous than Spain. A very loose estimation of its GDP, just using national averages for the populations, would be about two trillion USD, roughly equal to Russia