Crossing language and dialect borders in Switzerland: Romansh intra-national migrants

Büchler, Andrin (26 November 2021). Crossing language and dialect borders in Switzerland: Romansh intra-national migrants (Unpublished). In: Language Variation and Change across Borders. University of Salerno. 25.–26.11.2021.

Switzerland is a prototypical example for a country characterised by “territorial multilingualism” (cf. Riehl 2014: 64). Furthermore, German-speaking Switzerland is also well-known for its diglossia (cf. Ferguson 1959; Christen/Schmidlin 2019) with different Swiss German dialects being spoken (and also written) in non-formal situations next to Swiss Standard German, which is common in more formal situations. This rather unique sociolinguistic setting involves people sometimes crossing language (cf. Lüdi 1992) or dialect borders (cf. Werlen et al. 2002) when moving within the country. In both cases, this leads to a situation of intense contact. The present paper deals with speakers of the minority language Romansh, who, when moving to German-speaking Switzerland (e.g., to attend university), in fact cross both, language and dialect borders.
Due to the strong economic and social prevalence of German-speaking Switzerland, Romansh speakers generally acquire Swiss Standard German as well as a variety of Swiss German spoken in Grisons (the most eastern part of Switzerland) as L2 (cf. Eckhardt 2021). When moving to German-speaking Switzerland, they participate in a nearly exclusively German-speaking language community and thus get in contact with speakers of other, mostly Midland varieties of Swiss German. By adopting variationist sociolinguistic methods, the linguistic effects of this contact scenario are analysed. Specifically, this research investigates long-term accommodation processes in the L2 variety of Swiss German spoken by Romansh migrants in the city of Berne.
The sample contains sociolinguistic interviews of 40 tertiary-educated Romansh speakers, aged between 20 and 40, who have migrated to Berne at the age of about 19. The variationist analysis is based on two phonetic-phonological variables, Germanic word-initial (k) and non-Germanic word-initial (k). For both variables, the Grison variety of Swiss German has typical local variants, however, with the former being more “salient” (cf. Kerswill/Williams 2002). Long-term accommodation means that speakers level out these typical Grison features and approach variants common in most Swiss Midland varieties (that is, the adoption of supralocal variants). Results suggest a high degree of inter-speaker variability but only little intra-speaker variability. Some speakers rather consistently use Grison variants whilst others have accommodated to supralocal variants. For non-Germanic word-initial (k), accommodation seems to be constrained mainly by language biographical factors. With respect to Germanic word-initial (k), the social network structure along with the geographical orientation as well as language attitudes (i.e., how Romansh and Swiss German are conceptualised mentally
[cf. Geeraerts 2003]) turn out to be relevant predictors.

References
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