Zwingen

Zwingen is a municipality in the district of Laufen in the canton of Basel-Country in Switzerland. Zwingen has an area, , of . Of this area, or 33.3% is used for agricultural purposes, while or 38.1% is forested. Of the rest of the land, or 25.5% is settled (buildings or roads), or 2.6% is either rivers or lakes and or 0.2% is unproductive land. Of the built up area, industrial buildings made up 4.8% of the total area while housing and buildings made up 6.9% and transportation infrastructure made up 8.9%. Power and water infrastructure as well as other special developed areas made up 3.0% of the area while parks, green belts and sports fields made up 1.9%. Out of the forested land, 34.6% of the total land area is heavily forested and 3.5% is covered with orchards or small clusters of trees. Of the agricultural land, 19.9% is used for growing crops and 12.8% is pastures. All the water in the municipality is flowing water. The blazon of the municipal coat of arms is Sable, two Battons fleury Argent in saltire. Zwingen has a population () of . , 15.6% of the population are resident foreign nationals. Over the last 10 years (1997–2007) the population has changed at a rate of 9.3%. Most of the population () speaks German (1,781 or 88.3%), with Italian language being second most common (43 or 2.1%) and Turkish being third (40 or 2.0%). There are 39 people who speak French and 1 person who speaks Romansh. the gender distribution of the population was 50.6% male and 49.4% female. The population was made up of 1,779 Swiss citizens (83.1% of the population), and 361 non-Swiss residents (16.9%) Of the population in the municipality 595 or about 29.5% were born in Zwingen and lived there in 2000. There were 427 or 21.2% who were born in the same canton, while 590 or 29.3% were born somewhere else in Switzerland, and 331 or 16.4% were born outside of Switzerland. In there were 14 live births to Swiss citizens and 2 births to non-Swiss citizens, and in same time span there were 13 deaths of Swiss citizens.