Panel on utopias and dystopias/Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian-Swiss-German

[Adrian Wanner]

Dear SEELANGers
Is there anybody out there who would be interested in participating in a
panel on utopias/dystopias at the 1996 AAASS conference in Boston?  I am
currently working on a paper on Dostoevsky and Orwell. If you are working
on something similar, or know of a colleague who does, please let me know
(respond to me directly rather than to the list).
On an unrelated note, I have been following with interest the discussion
about Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian. Since I am from Switzerland, I think some
observations about the linguistic situation there might be illuminating.
The language spoken in the German part of Switzerland differs so
significantly from standard German that unprepared German native speakers
do not understand it (i.e., it varies much  more from German than Croatian
does from Serbian). There were in fact some Swiss nationalists, especially
during the 1930s, who proposed that Swiss German should be declared a
separate language and be used as the official idiom.  I can only say,
thank God it never happened! The result would have been the
provincialization and linguistic isolation of Switzerland. We would have
had our own "official" language all right, but few people in the rest of
the world would have bothered to learn it. Not everybody in Switzerland
likes the Germans, but by staying within the orbit of the German
language, we have made sure that our writers are read not just locally,
but also in Germany, Austria, and in the rest of Europe and the world.