[lg policy] book notice: Do you speak Swiss?

Mon Feb 14 15:41:39 UTC 2011

Do you speak Swiss?
Posted on February 14, 2011 by Ingrid Piller

A most amazing book has just landed on my desk: Do you speak Swiss,
edited by Walter Haas, is the final report on a Swiss National
Research Project devoted to Linguistic Diversity and Language
Competence in Switzerland. Initiated by the Swiss Parliament in 2003,
the national project (which was known as NFP56 for short) consisted of
26 research projects, which, over a period of three years from 2006 to
2008, investigated a wide variety of aspects of multilingualism,
language policy and language learning. I was privileged to head one of
those projects, an investigation into multilingualism in the Swiss
tourism industry, together with Alexandre Duchêne; and it’s great to
see it all come together in this final report.

One of the beauties of the report is how the book is iconic of its
content. The front cover is quintilingual in English, French, German,
Italian and Romansh although the English title obviously overshadows
the subtitle in the four national languages. About two thirds of the
240-page report is presented quadrilingually in the four national
languages, followed by an English translation, which is printed on
green paper. So, the design makes it easy to navigate between the
national languages and English. Within the national languages section,
the languages are mingling nicely rather than being segregated into
separate sections. However, a thumb index makes it possible to go
straight to a particular language if you so wish. The thumb index for
German is almost a solid line, indicating that there is a lot of
German used throughout; the indexes for French and Italian are more
like a dotted line, and the index for Romansh consists only of three
dots, iconic of the minority status of that language.

Overall, the report provides a wealth of findings around three key
research questions: how does Swiss multilingualism work? What are the
current linguistic competences of the Swiss population? What should
the linguistic competences of the Swiss population be in the future
and how can we plan for those? There is such a wealth of findings that
I’ll blog about some of the 26 projects individually in the near
future. For now, I’ll focus on the six key issues highlighted by the
editor as emerging from the national project:

   1. How multilingualism works: projects devoted to institutional
multilingualism in contexts such as the Swiss army or tourism
businesses (as in our project) highlight people’s pragmatism and
flexibility in relation to the multilingual realities in which they
find themselves. Of course, institutional pragmatism and flexibility
is only possible if there are a certain number of multilingual
individuals in the institution. However, institutions do not do much
to promote individual multilingualism and to offer systematic language
training. So, one of the report’s recommendations is for institutions
to acknowledge individual multilingualism more as a resource and to
remunerate it accordingly and also for the provision of more
systematic language training.

   2. Learning languages: language learning needs to happen in school
and there are a range of challenges to make language education more
effective. These range from questions around which languages should be
introduced when and other language-in-education policy issues to more
classroom oriented questions such as language teaching methods. A
number of projects, for instance, highlighted the importance of
resourcing language teaching properly as shallow learning results in
quick forgetting, and so is largely a wasted effort.

 3. English: the role of English is as hot a topic in Switzerland as
elsewhere and the report’s pragmatism is refreshing: English is here
to stay and a central facet of the Swiss linguistic landscape, as it
is globally, but English is not enough. For Switzerland, at least, the
future continues to be multilingual.

   4. Standard- and non-standard varieties: German-speaking Swiss
often quip that Standard German is their first foreign language.
However, NFP56 research has shown that the majority population is
largely unaffected by this difference between Swiss and standard
German varieties. The people who have trouble to master the standard,
both in German-speaking and Francophone Switzerland are those with a
migration background pointing to the need to improve educational
opportunities for migrant populations.

   5. Linguistic minorities: the indigenous minority languages of
Italian and Romansh have traditionally enjoyed equality before the
law, even if not outside the institutions of the state. While the
challenge to ensure equal opportunities for the speakers of the
indigenous minority languages remains to some degree, the much larger
challenge that has emerged in recent years is the one to ensure equal
opportunities for the “new” minorities that have resulted from the
migrations of the past decades. The report is adamant that there is
often a double standard that views the maintenance of indigenous
minority languages as desirable but views the same maintenance as a
failure of “integration” when it comes to non-indigenous minorities.
However, research projects in the NFP56 also found that migrant
languages are maintained well in Switzerland, even in the 3rd
generation, and most of the projects highlighted the importance of
acknowledging and supporting their maintenance in the interest of
Swiss society as a whole.

   6. Multilingual media: somewhat surprisingly the media were found
to be far behind the country’s multilingual reality with most media
catering narrowly to what they see as their linguistic clientele.

Ultimately, the linguistic challenges of Switzerland are those of
every contemporary society. The Swiss are fortunate in that they have
been thinking about how to make societal multilingualism work for the
common good for much longer than pretty much everyone else.
Switzerland is also fortunate in that their politicians had the good
sense to initiate and fund a national research project that will form
the basis of future language policy. Everyone involved in language
policy, language-in-education policy, the sociolinguistics of
multilingualism and language learning has a lot to learn from NFP56!
If you only read one sociolinguistics book this year, make it Do you
speak Swiss?

ResearchBlogging.org Walter Haas (Ed.) (2010). Do you speak Swiss?
Sprachenvielfalt und Sprachkompetenz in der Schweiz. Nationales
Forschungsprogramm NFP 56 NZZ Libro

http://www.languageonthemove.com/language-learning-gender-identity/do-you-speak-swiss?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=do-you-speak-swiss

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