In this paper, we offer a succinct overview of the Swiss context and the experience of Switzerland with bilingual education. In Section 1, we briefly characterise the issue at a general level, providing some deŽfinitions necessary for the ensuing discussion. In Section 2, we review the main features of ‘linguistic governance' in Switzerland, with reference to its demolinguistic, geolinguistic and historical context. Section 3 presents the main traits of language education in Switzerland, while Section 4 is devoted to a descriptive overview of the (very few) cases of bilingual education in this country; in Section 5, we attempt to assess these experiments. In a concluding Section 6, we discuss the parallels and differences between the respective language education challenges of Switzerland and Latvia.