Languages, script and national identity: struggles over linguistic heterogeneity in Switzerland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (original) (raw)
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19. Multilingualism in Switzerland
2019
This chapter deals with the two Romance languages which are officially recognized as minority languages of Switzerland, Romansh and Italian, and with Francoprovençal and French dialects spoken marginally in the francophone area of Switzerland. Romansh, the language that has gained new recognition in the process leading to the quadrilingual Swiss Confederation, is considered in most detail. The comparison of the Romance minorities shows the different starting conditions from which they have developed and the various initiatives undertaken to organize them at private and state levels. The last decades have been characterized by concerns about maintaining language territories, development of mass media in minority languages as well as promotion of minority languages in education. The trend towards a more ethnolinguistic conception of Switzerland has recently been counterbalanced by the greater attention paid to the promotion of minority languages outside their traditional areas
2017
The publication of Languages in contact in 1953, first reprinted in 1963, helped establish Uriel Weinreich's reputation as one of the most outstanding linguists of the twentieth century. This early work was to a great extent based on his Ph.D. dissertation, Research problems in bilingualism: With special reference to Switzerland, defended in 1951 at Columbia University. Weinreich (1953:xi) mentions this fact and refers to his fieldwork in Switzerland carried out in 1949 and 1950. Many readers, however, may be unaware that the published book did not include all parts of his dissertation, in spite of occasional hints referring to a more detailed description in the unpublished manuscript. Discussing, for example, phonic interference in Romansh-Swiss German language contact, Weinreich refers to "details in doctoral dissertation" (1953:14), and, in the chapter on geographic areas, he relates to his description of the German-French border north of Fribourg (1953:89-91). The book under review here, while alluding through its title to the 1953 publication, presents in fact the until now unpublished manuscript of Weinreich's dissertation. Up to now, hardly anybody knew of the manuscript kept by the Columbia University Archives, despite the existence of a number of black and white microfilm reproductions around, for example, at the Zurich University libraries (Deutsches Seminar and Bibliothek Jakob Jud). The 2011 edition is based on the personal copy of William Labov, who assumes this copy to be one of only two complete copies existing. It includes (p. v) the reproduction of a coloured map of the linguistic situation of Switzerland from about 1941 (by Heinrich Frey). The original text was digitized with the help of Optical Character Recognition; the hand drawn colour maps were adapted to grey scale and some bar graphs reformatted. In addition, the editors adapted the text in several points, which I comment on later. For the most part, however, the original text is reproduced. Initial questions might arise in view of a sixty-year-old manuscript, such as whether it is indeed still worth reading, and what the motivation was for the editors Ronald I. Kim and William Labov to publish it. In their introduction,
Multilingualism in Switzerland: An Overview
Journal of European Studies (JES)
Multilingualism claims centrality in the discourse community. Besides being an important aspect of linguistics, it has been a socio-political phenomenon. Developments in human history, particularly the growing concept of globalization, wars, treaties, invasions, colonialization, and migrations have ensured that most of the states in today’s world are multilingual, multicultural, or sometimes even multinational in character. During the 18th and the 19th centuries, the rising wave of nation-states based on one language, one culture, and one religion, multilingualism was considered and treated as a curse and menace to the socio-political harmony of the state. Nonetheless, there were few states which showed firm faith in unity in diversity. They remained neutral to those developments and kept alive through preserving, protecting, and flourishing the feature of multilingualism in state policies. Switzerland is considered the spearhead and torchbearer in this march. The foundation of mode...
Language and National Identity in the Era of Globalization: The Case of English in Switzerland
Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2005
This article engages the intersection of language, national identity, nation state, English and discourses of (global) modernization, progress, and the transcendence of the national vis-à-vis an instructive case: Switzerland. It examines the rise of English in multilingual Switzerland and its potential impact on Swiss collective (national) identity. It reflects, as well, on the ways in which English’s spread might influence the ethic of multilingual reciprocity in the Swiss and global contexts. It is contended that despite significant shortcomings, multilingualism has survived and, to a large extent, even thrived in Switzerland precisely because that nation state has legally and normatively codified the protection of linguistic particularism and established multilingualism as a basic component of its national identity. Yet even state-sanctioned and officially codified multilingualisms deeply embedded in national mythology, such as in Switzerland, are potentially threatened by an inc...