Sursilvan

[4] The most closely related variety is Sutsilvan, which is spoken in the area located to the east of the district.

The name of the dialect and the Surselva District is derived from sur 'above' and selva 'forest', with the forest in question being the Uaul Grond in the area affected by the Flims Rockslide.

Sursilvan is used across most of the Surselva District, with the exception of the Walser villages of Obersaxen, Vals, St. Martin and Safiental.

In addition, Sursilvan was previously used as the written Romansh language of parts of the Sutsilvan dialect area.

In all of these, except for Flims, however, a majority of people reported using Romansh daily in the 2000 Swiss census, even if only a minority named it as their language of best command.

Syntactically these collective plurals behave like feminine singular nouns: La crappa ei dira.

dira 'hard' agreeing with the subject la crappa 'the rock(s)') and may best be considered as an intermediate formation between inflection and derivation.

The fable The Fox and the Crow by Jean de La Fontaine in Sursilvan, as well as a translation into English, the similar-looking but noticeably different-sounding dialect Sutsilvan, and Rumantsch Grischun.

Their entry representing Switzerland in the Eurovision Song Contest 1989, Viver senza tei, was sung in Sursilvan.