Italian Switzerland is the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, which includes the Canton of Ticino and the southern part of Graubünden. Italian is also spoken in the Gondo Valley in Valais.
The linguistic region covers an area approximately 3,500 km² and has a total population of around 350,000 inhabitants, with the number of Italophones residing in Switzerland being 545,274 (about 7% of the Swiss population).
The proportion of Italian-speaking inhabitants had been decreasing since the 1970s, after reaching a high of 12% of the population during the same decade. This was entirely because of the reduced number of immigrants from Italy to Switzerland, but gained again during the last decade