Chunsch druus? (Swiss German for “get it?”) is a learning programme aimed at the general, mainly younger learner who wishes to develop key linguistic competences necessary for coping with the challenges of everyday life in the German part of Switzerland. Integration in the largest sector of Switzerland mustn’t overlook the use of dialect. This does not mean that foreigners, migrants or Swiss who speak Italian and French necessarily need to learn how to speak a Swiss German dialect –...

The goal of the project mandated by the department of education of the Canton of Geneva was to understand the role which available orientation measures, including courses, play in the scholastic and professional integration of young immigrants. Moreover, the project aimed to identify systemic challenges facing such institutions, personnel at the institutions and the immigrants themselves.

This project focuses on the study of multilingualism from the perspective of the recent mobilities and globalisation paradigm. This paradigm takes up the analysis of linguistic practices by mobile people with transnational trajectories such as the immigrants or tourists who come to Spain and need to interact and communicate with civic institutions, on the one hand, and with autochthonous people whose life trajectories are more stable, on the other.

The project examines the German-French language border in Switzerland through the analysis of touristic discourses and activities. By looking at the language border through the eyes of tourism, the project places Swiss multilingualism clearly in the context of globalisation and its related socio-economic changes. The research focuses on two regions situated on the language border in the cantons Valais and Fribourg: the areas of Sierre/Siders and Murten/Morat, where tourism plays a key...

This project adopts a sociolinguistic approach to examine the linguistic aspects of tourism on three levels: 1. How do people deal with multilingualism in basic interaction, for example, at the airport or the tourist information desk? 2. How are these practices established in training programs? 3. What linguistic strategies are applied when advertising a particular tourist destination, for example, in slogans and brochures?

Work in our project “Performing Swissness: institutions, discourse and social transformation” focuses on ways in which discourse practices at Swiss institutions for culture, tourism and economic development construct a particular image of Switzerland. The project also explores the role of social and economic transformation when (re-)defining what “Swissness” constitutes.