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

[Adrian Wanner]

On Wed, 11 Oct 1995, Peter Slomanson wrote:
>
  Do
> Italians, Czechs, Swedes, etc. feel impoverished and deprived of an
> international audience because they write in a "smaller" language?  I
> don't think so.  If Swiss Germans decide to continue writing in
> German, that is fine, although since it is not their daily vernacular,
> I personally feel that something is being sacrificed.  Also, how many
> ordinary Swiss Germans who might have become great writers have not
> done so as a result of a lack of facility with the standard language
> (although they might have extraordinary expressive abilities in their
> native language)?  I would not be easily convinced that all Swiss
> Germans have equal linguistic facility in the standard language and
> that such factors as socioeconomic class do not influence who does and
> who does not.  Finally, by your use of the term "provincialization"
> you _are_ implying that nations whose writers employ languages other
> than the obvious English, French, Spanish, German, possibly Russian,
> etc. are in some sense "provincial."  What does this mean really?  How
> many of the readers of and contributors to SEELangs would feel
> comfortable with this statement (a rhetorical question, obviously)?
>
> Peter Slomanson
> Philadelphia, USA
>
It was not my intention to insult the smaller nations of Europe by
implying that their cultural achievements are somehow diminished by the
fact that they use a "minor language."  However, whether we like it or
not, it does make a difference whether one uses a language which is
understood by hundreds of millions of people or only by a few million.
True, some books get translated, but most don't!
I don't think that the current diglossia (German for writing/Swiss German
for oral communication) is necessarily a handicap for the Swiss.  There
is no evidence to suggest that the Swiss are more inept in handling
written German than the Germans.  One could even argue that the
elimination of German as a written language would leave the Swiss
linguistically impoverished, since it would deprive them of the
possibility of code-switching and make them boringly monolingual.  Swiss
writers often use the tension between the two languages in a creative
way.  To suggest that they would be better off writing in Swiss German is
like suggesting that Gogol made a mistake when he decided to write in
Russian rather than Ukrainian (I am aware that some people have this
opinion).
Of course, education and by implication, socioeconomic status, have
something to do with how well somebody writes German.  But this is hardly
unique to Switzerland, it probably applies to any society.  Note the
difficulties of Americans from the "inner city" to master the linguistic
code necessary for success in academia and business. Does that mean that
something is wrong with having standard English as a written language?