>>That's not too different from asking a Swiss why they have 3 official languages...it's just that their country formed from large enough groups of people speaking diverse languages, that they had to recognize it. In the US, all the other minority languages weren't large enough for this to happen.
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>I believe it is 4 official languages. Can anyone name the fourth?
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>I heard that German was a close contender for English in the early US.

The national languages of Switzerland are German (central and north-eastern Switzerland), French (western Switzerland), Italian (southern Switzerland) and Rhaeto-Romanic (southeastern Switzerland).
Probably all of them are Swiss versions.