In the interest of advancing multilingualism in public services, the Swiss Confederation is legally bound to promoting federal employees' language skills in Switzerland's official languages. The divisions within the Federal Administration are obligated to ensure that all employees have sufficient knowledge of a second official language and that persons in a leadership role additionally have passive skills in a third official language. To implement these directives, the Federal Administration...

Adult language acquisition (of German) has generated a great deal of scientific interest over the past decades. However, variation in input and output as a consequence of specific sociolinguistic contexts has mostly been neglected so far. The present project focuses on untutored language acquisition in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and on the question of how standard and dialect interact in the emergence of second language systems.