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Open societal innovation (OSI) refers to the adaptation and subsequent sustainable use of appropriate open innovation approaches from business, adapted and utilized by state and society to solve societal challenges.Particularly desirable is the creation of an innovation culture that appeals to and includes all societal actors equally, thus providing innovative potential for the community and the entire Lake Constance region.

Research on the linguistic landscape (LL) is starting to become conspicuous, particularly with regard to Europe and Asia. As far as Italy is concerned, I am aware of 14 pieces of research published so far that have looked at its linguistic landscape, four of them focusing on the presence of English (Griffin, 2004 carried out in Rome; Ross, 1997 carried out in Milan; Schlick, 2002 carried out in Klagenfurt, Ljubljana and Udin/Udine; Schlick, 2003 carried out in eight European cities including Trieste and Pordenone), three on English and/or the languages of recent immigrants (Barni, 2006; Gorter, 2009; Barni and Bagna, 2010), and another seven on the local minority/regional languages (Blackwood and Tufi, this volume; Coluzzi, 2009b; Dal Negro, 2009; Grazioli, 2006; Plank, 2006; Puzey, 2009; Puzey, this volume). Plank’s research was carried out in Bozen/Bolzano (Trentino Alto-Adige) and looked at the presence of the state language, Italian, and of the co-official language, German, on commercial shop signs, bars and restaurants in two areas of the city, the centre and the neighbourhood of Europa-Novacella. Dal Negro’s research was carried out in two non-urban settings: Formazza (Piedmont), where an Alemannic German variety is spoken, and Vilnos/Funes (Trentino Alto-Adige), where similarly to Bozen/Bolzano, a Bavarian variety, standard German and Italian are present.

This paper aims to explain the high scores of 15-year-old native pupils in the Netherlands andFlanders by comparing them with the scores of pupils in countries with the same highly stratifiededucational system. Therefore, we compare only the educational performance of 15-year-old pupilsfrom the following regions: the Netherlands, Flanders, Wallonia, the German Länder, the SwissGerman cantons, and Austria. We use the data from the general Program for International PupilAssessment (PISA) 2006 together with the specific PISA data of Germany and Switzerland also from2006. We apply a multilevel model that takes into account the individual-, curriculum-, andsystem-level features in these highly stratified educational systems. The high scores of the Dutchpupils can be explained by the size of the Netherlands’ vocational sector. The high Flemish scorescan be only partly explained by the high curriculum mobility (as indicated by the lowest level ofentrance selection). Central exit exams are not a good explanation of the high Dutch scores.Despite being limited to highly stratified systems, we still find educational policies andarrangements to have significant effects on the educational performance of pupils.

Two previous experiments demonstrated that f0 and duration are interdependent in the perception of rhythmic groups in speech and sentence rhythmicality, and that the relative weighting of tonal and durational cues depends on listeners’ native language. The listeners were native speakers of Swiss German, Swiss French, or Metropolitan French (i.e. from France). The experiment reported here investigates a means of applying this perceptual finding to production data from these three languages, to make a rhythm metric, the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI), perceptually informed. The relative weighting that an appropriate duration and an appropriate f0 contributed to listeners’ rhythmicality judgements is calculated, and these language-specific weighting values are incorporated into combined durational- tonal PVIs, to quantify rhythm in the three languages. The results demonstrate that Swiss German and Swiss/Metropolitan French are distinct according to classic durational PVIs, but more similar according to PVIs which are acoustically multidimensional and language-specifically weighted. It is concluded that rhythm produced by speakers, when quantified to account for the acoustic multidimensionality and language-specificity of rhythm perceived by listeners, may be less cross-linguistically divergent than durational rhythm metrics suggest. An evaluation of these language-specifically weighted PVIs concludes that if rhythm metrics remain in use, they should link rhythm perception with rhythm production.

As a minority language in Switzerland, the Romansh of the Grisons is exposed to pressure from the dominant language in its region, namely (Swiss) German. Consequently, it has not developed a generally accepted standardized written form, being above all a spoken language, which cedes many written functions to the dominant language. These premises entail a complex spectrum of language variation in informal written use of Romansh in SMS-communication. This variation includes deviations from regional written norms, traits of (dialectal) orality, interference of (Swiss) German, and code-switching to (Swiss) German. Language contact is evident in the fact that Romansh is used for part of an SMS whereas another part of the same SMS sent by the same person may be written in one or even in two varieties of the majority language, i.e. German and Swiss German. Some speakers of Romansh, mainly people who live outside of the traditional linguistic territory, do not write in Romansh at all. It should be noted that the users of Romansh in SMS-communication who participated in this research project are mainly women with university-level educations who are working in the tertiary sector.

Sociolinguistic variation in Austria and the German-speaking part of Switzerland has traditionally been described in very different terms. In Austria, the linguistic range between the standard language and the local dialects has been referred to as a ‘standard-dialect-continuum’, whereas the German-speaking part of Switzerland has often been cited as the typical example of a ‘diglossic’ language community. The sociolinguistic situation in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg, which is part of a primarily Bavarian-speaking country but also of the Alemannic dialect region, has not been thoroughly examined in any studies up to date. In this paper, we present results from an online-survey in Austria and Switzerland on the everyday use of dialect and the standard language. According to our informants' estimates, the sociolinguistic situation in both Austria and German-speaking Switzerland is characterised by a significant percentage of dialect use. Still, the standard language is regarded quite differently in the two countries. A considerable proportion of the Swiss informants perceive the standard language as a ‘foreign language’. However, this does not seem to be a common attitude among the Austrian informants. The main difference between the two countries lies in the observation that Austrians feel they use an intermediate form between dialect and the standard language, a so-called ‘Umgangssprache’, in many situations, whereas the Swiss indicate that they speak their local dialect or the standard language under specific communicative circumstances. However, the German-speaking Swiss population, as well as the informants from Vorarlberg, do not seem to use an intermediate form. The situation in Vorarlberg is particularly interesting. On the one hand, as far as the status of dialect and the dichotomy of dialect and standard are concerned, Vorarlberg patterns similarly to the German-speaking part of Switzerland. On the other hand, people from Vorarlberg have to adapt to their Bavarian-speaking fellow countrymen and women and switch to standard German in intra-national communication (e.g. at the workplace or on national help lines).

From January 31st to March 11th 2011 four traveling fellows representing the German speaking associated orthopaedic societies visited different academic orthopaedic centers in the U.K., Canada and the USA.

In some Swiss German dialects the verb laa 'let' can be doubled under certain conditions. The paper discusses the factors accounting for this variation. It investigates the syntactic environment of laa-constructions in the dialect of Zurich. The analysis of the data suggests that, first, the laa-doubling is favoured in certain constructions such as, for instance, imperative constructions. Second, the elder informants use the laa-doubling more often than the younger ones.

In this paper we describe our efforts in reducing and correcting OCR errors in the context of building a large multilingual heritage corpus of Alpine texts which is based on digitizing the publications of various Alpine clubs. We have already digitized the yearbooks of the Swiss Alpine Club from its start in 1864 until 1995 with more than 75,000 pages resulting in 29 million running words. Since these books have come out continuously, they represent a unique basis for historical, cultural and linguistic research. We used commercial OCR systems for the conversion from the scanned images to searchable text. This poses several challenges. For example, the built-in lexicons of the OCR systems do not cover the 19th century German spelling, the Swiss German spelling variants and the plethora of toponyms that are characteristic of our text genre.We also realized that different OCR systems make different recognition errors. We therefore run two OCR systems over all our scanned pages and merge the output. Merging is especially tricky at spots where both systems result in partially correct word groups. We describe our strategies for reducing OCR errors by enlarging the systems’ lexicons and by two post-correction methods namely merging the output of two OCR systems and auto-correction based on additional lexical resources.

The present paper deals with the doubling verb aafaa "begin" in Swiss German. The investigation concentrates on the region Baden-Wettigen in the North of the Canton Aargau. This is a transition zone between doubling and non-doubling. The paper discusses the frequency of the doubling of the verb aafaa "begin" as well as the factors triggering or rather blocking doubling.

Most work in natural language processing is geared towards written, standardized language varieties. In this paper, we present a morphology generator that is able to handle continuous linguistic variation, as it is encountered in the dialect landscape of German-speaking Switzerland. The generator derives inflected dialect forms from Standard German input. Besides generation of inflectional affixes, this system also deals with the phonetic adaptation of cognate stems and with lexical substitution of non-cognate stems. Most of its rules are parametrized by probability maps extracted from a dialectological atlas, thereby providing a large dialectal coverage.

The purpose of the present paper is to draw an outline of the researchdone on the linguistic Situation of the second generation of Italian immigrants in German-speaking Switzerland. Section l deals with the configuration of the repertoire and the linguistic biography, while section 2 provides a description of the Italian variety; in section 3 different types and functions of code-switching between Italian and Swiss German are discussed. There is evidence for a highly intact maintenance of the mother tongue as a result of the particular Status of the Italian language in the area. The deviations from Standard Italian found in the language spoken by second generation immigrants are not to be interpreted as Symptoms of language attrition, since they truly reflect the linguistic features of the oral non Standard input. Also the frequency of intra-sentential code-swilching reveals a high degree of linguistic competence in both languages.

Located on the northwestern slopes of the Austrian Alps and bordering the countries of Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, Vorarlberg is the second smallest Austrian province, but also the second most densely populated after Vienna. Its population of 368,000 [I] is hardly even that of a medium-sized European city, and inhabits an area of roughly 2,600 square kilometers [II]. Vorarlberg is geographically closed off from the rest of Austria, and the only connections to the neighboring province of Tyrol are provided by three surface roads, as well as the railroad and street tunnel through the Arlberg mountain. Due to its isolated location, most of the province’s population speaks a distinctive German dialect which many of the country’s other inhabitants find hard to understand. It is similar to the Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Alsace region in France, and parts of southwestern Germany, whereas the dialects spoken in the rest of Austria form part of the Bavarian-Austrian language group. Many towns and villages even have their own distinct sub-dialects.

This experiment investigated whether fundamental frequency (f0) and duration are interdependent cues for the perceived rhythmicality of sentences, and whether this depends on the native language of listeners. The task required a judgement of which stimulus sentence had the most natural- sounding rhythm. In the stimuli, duration and f0 were manipulated on a certain syllable to test whether a deviant duration results in a less natural- sounding rhythm than a deviant f0 movement, or vice versa. The listeners were native speakers of Swiss German (SG), Swiss French (SFr) or French (Fr). SG and Fr differ from each other in terms of prosodic properties involving f0 and duration; in particular, their rhythms sound different. The results demonstrate that duration and f0 are interdependent cues for perceived rhythmicality, and that the relative significance of a non-deviant duration and a non-deviant f0 excursion in the rhythmicality judgements of listeners depends on their native language. Importantly, these findings have implications for current research on speech rhythm.

This chapter presents summaries of the methodology and results of studies relevant to SDA in naturalistic contexts. The primary aim is to describe how much of the D2 was acquired by individuals and groups of subjects. As in studies of SLA, the particular degree of acquisition is referred to here as the level of attainment. The first section of the chapter deals with the question of how attainment in SDA can be measured. The following two sections outline seventeen studies of SDA, eight done on dialects of English and nine on dialects of other languages. After a summary of the overall results, there are brief descriptions of three other studies that focus on shift from the D1 rather than attainment in the D2. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some methodological issues. Measuring attainment in SDA How can we measure attainment in SDA? Because of the linguistic similarities that usually exist between the D1 and D2, many of the methods used in SLA studies are usually not suitable – for example, grammaticality judgements and measures of fluency and communicative success. This is because D1 speakers normally know the basic grammar of the D2, since it is virtually the same as that of the D1. Furthermore, because of mutual intelligibility, they can usually communicate fluently by using the D1 with D2 speakers. That leaves us with examining observable behaviour – i.e. performance data. More specifically, we need to concentrate on linguistic features that distinguish the D2 from the D1.

Data from two children are examined to determine at what stage in their linguistic development they start to use ‘doubly-filled COMPs' (DFCs) and in which contexts they use them. The term DFC refers to a configuration in which a phrasal element (e.g. a wh-phrase) co-occurs with a complementizer (e.g. that) in COMP. The focus is on DFCs in wh-complements of Swiss German. The distribution of DFCs in samples of adult data from two dialects is compared to extract the contexts in which DFCs are used. While in both dialects DFCs are excluded in wh-complements with monosyllabic wh-phrases, they are obligatory with non-monosyllabic wh-phrases in one dialect, but somewhat optional in the other. It has been shown that Swiss-German children acquire DFCs around age 5. This is also true of the children discussed here. However, the question of how children deal with the variable distribution of DFCs has not been addressed before. It will be shown that while DFCs seem somewhat optional in the input one of the children is exposed to, this optionality is not visible in the child data. This is taken to reflect the child's striving to regularize a seemingly irregular pattern.

Wer im Netz deutschsprachige Seiten besucht, erwartet nicht, dass er Mundart findet, sondern die Schriftsprache, Standardsprache. Schließlich ist das die überregionale Sprachform und sie stellt auch in der Schweiz die unmarkierte Variante dar. Doch in diesem Bereich finden sich eine ganze Menge Web-Seiten, deren Gestalter sich der Welt in Mundart kundtun, wie in Tabelle 1 dargestellt. Neben rund 12'100 Seiten aus der Schweiz,1 die sowohl gehabt als auch gewesen als Hinweis auf standard-deutsche Seiten aufweisen, finden sich auch rund 3400, die mit verschiedenen Kombinationen der Schreibvarianten von ghaa und gsy erscheinen. Sie können damit als Seiten in einer schweizerdeutschen Mundart verstanden werden. Der Anteil mundartlicher Seiten auf dem .ch-Domain kann also auf rund 22 % geschätzt werden. The regional chat-rooms in Switzerland show an extremely high portion of dialectal contributions (up to 90%). This non-standardized spontaneous writing of a dialectal language still reflects the geolinguistic distribution described in the linguistic atlas of German speaking Switzerland SDS (1962-1997) based on recordings of the 1940s and 1950s. This paper shows some reflexes of this geolinguistic distribution in four chat-rooms. The graphemic representation of the ending vowel of infinitives clearly confirms the traditional structure. Deviating e-graphemes in chat-rooms of alpine regions can be rated as common Swiss German variants for centralized vowels. On the other hand ä-graphemes in chat-rooms of the Swiss midlands are to be rated as marking of the phonetic deviation from the standard German pronunciation. This variation is not only found in inherited words, but also in neologisms with an almost identical distribution. The SDS illustrates a distribution for the use of t-endings in the 2nd and 3rd singular of sein 'to be'. These t-flexives cannot be found anymore in midland chat-rooms. They appear only in alpine chat-rooms, and there they become morphologized in a new way. The dialectal writing of neologisms confirms the validity of the principles for the Standard German writing.

This paper intends to show the importance of having linguistic instruments, principally semantic ones, for determining the meaning of words with the greatest precision and, consequently, managing to meticulously establish the different meanings of a dictionary's entry words. As an example, a new definition of the Spanish verb mezclar ('to mix') will b Since the beginning of the publication of the linguistic atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, SDS) in the early 1960s individual linguists collected contemporary material for comparison to investigate language change. However, due to time and money restrictions these studies were limited to small parts of the language area only. So far a description of tendencies concerning the entire Swiss German language area is missing. Based on an online-survey of 5600 informants this investigation is the first to present word geographic data covering (almost) the whole German-speaking Switzerland. Comparing GIS-maps of SDS and online data of the dialectal lexemes for freckles, onion and butterfly, language change over the last century becomes apparent, with striking convergence tendencies towards standard German, but also a Swiss German dialect expanding its range. Most of the dialect words mentioned in the SDS were preserved; some new were found. Thus, diversity of lexicon and creative language use are not endangered. Statistical analysis showed that younger speakers are more likely to deviate from the SDS. Less strong, but still significant were the influence of the parent's dialect and the duration of living in the dialect area, whereas gender had no influence.

This paper examines the word order found within the verbal complex in Gurinerdeutsch, a relatively isolated Swiss German dialect. A novel method- ology, combining the analysis of transcribed texts with grammaticality judgments of naive native speakers, is introduced. The resulting description shows word order within the Gurinerdeutsch verb complex to be similar to that found in other Upper Alemannic dialects, although there are certain features — the order of certain arguments of verbs, the positioning of the particle z (corresponding to Standard German zu) 'to'— that pose interes- ting challenges to current accounts of word order within the verbal complex in Continental West Germanic languages.

A new oral ‘pause-break’ task is described for eliciting judgments about syllable boundaries from speakers of languages of diverse types who have potentially limited educational and/or literacy levels. Results are presented from five different languages, including English. The English results replicate the findings from previous studies using other techniques, while the following generalizations follow from the application of the technique to Arabic, Blackfoot, Korean, and Swiss German: There is (1) a widespread tendency to treat single intervocalic consonants as syllable onsets and (2) an equally broad tendency to break between the two members of intervocalic CC clusters. The treatment of intervocalic geminates or long consonants (as in Arabic and Blackfoot) seems to vary as a function of educational level: In general, the better educated, literate speakers interpret them as disegments and treat them as in (2) above, while the semiliterate subjects often interpret them as single segments and treat them as in (1). The technique itself seems to have proved itself as suitable for use with speakers of a wide range of educational levels and languages.

Dative relativization in the Swiss German language area is subject to a lot of variation, but does not show clear geographical patterns. Rather, there is widespread interand intra-speaker variation. I discuss the importance of various sources in variation research and propose an account that models the variation by means of realizational constraints that interact in Optimality-theoretic fashion.

When children start to talk early in their second year, it is often difficult to identify their first words. Their earliest attempts typically fall far short of the adult forms. Take one one-year-old's first production of the English word squirrel : ga . Upon reflection, we can trace the processes that probably led to this simplified pronunciation. First, children typically omit liquid sounds like l and r ; they simplify consonant clusters, usually retaining only the stop if there is one, so in the initial cluster skw -, they drop both the glide w and the initial s -, keeping only the velar stop k ; and they often voice initial stop consonants, here changing the k - into a g -. Finally, vowels in children's earliest words are typically produced with little or no narrowing of the vocal tract, here the a . In this case, we know what the target word was. But this is often not the case. Young children are also inconsistent in how they produce the same word on different occasions. Their pronunciations vary more than adults' do from one occasion to the next, and, in their first few months of talking, they may produce multiple versions of the same word (Ingram 1974; Maekawa & Storkel 2006; Sosa & Stoel-Gammon 2006). One child, Philip, used as many as five different versions of blanket within a month. At age 1;9, he had multiple versions of 50 of the 125 words in his repertoire.

From late in the 1530s, this work was being undertaken by Leo Jud, Zwingli's close companion and the leading figure in the translation of the Bible into Alemannic. Bullinger builds on this analogy to argue that God has declared to the people His commandments and instructions for how they should order their affairs. This crucial theme of the Christian Moses, who teaches all, and not just the Israelites, is also to be found in other Zurich writers, such as Pellikan, who addressed the subject in the preface to his biblical commentaries. Bullinger compares the Twelve Tables of Roman law to the Ten Commandments to argue that everything that is embodied in Greek and Roman learning has been surpassed by the Word of God. Keywords: Christian Moses; Israelites; Philosophy:Heinrich Bullingers; Ten Commandments; Word of God

This article assesses the relevance of Basil Bernstein for German-speaking Switzerland. It argues that Bernstein is potentially relevant for German-speaking Switzerland in light of contemporary studies which highlight a connection between social background and differential school achievement. After contextualising Bernstein's theoretical outlook and critically reflecting upon his use of a static concept of social class, it explores past and present applications of Bernstein. The paper thereby shows that the uptake of Bernstein's outlook was and continues to be minimal for the Swiss German context and reasons for this conclusion are explored. In the final sections of the article connections between social background and differential school achievement are explored for contemporary German-speaking Switzerland. On the basis of this analysis, the paper concludes by arguing that while aspects of Basil Bernstein's theoretical outlook are potentially relevant for the Swiss German context, they need to be reassessed in light of the awareness of the variety of interdependent factors which can and do influence the performance of children and adolescents at school.

Phenotype and allele frequencies of the coagulation factor 13 B (FSF B) of three Swiss populations (Northern Switzerland, upper Rhone valley and valley of Safien) have been determined after electrophoresis and passive immunoblotting and are discussed with respect to the geographical distribution and to the history of these populations. The populations of the upper Rhone valley and the valley of Safien reveal a closer genetical relationship obviously due to the migration of the antecedents of the recent Safier from the Rhone valley to the Safien valley from the 13th to 14th century. The allele frequencies of the Swiss German population fit rather well the North-South genetical cline which has to be considered in the light of the early settlement of Central Europe and of the numerous migrations thereafter.

In a small community of approximately 760 High Alemannic speakers, four reflexes of the MHG directional particle anhin co-occur: (aje), (ae), (ahe) and (ane) in a case of active variation leading to change. The distribution patterns indicate that the most active variants, (aje) and (ane), are evaluated differently by different segments of the community. In the adult population we find speakers for whom the variation is still active and subconscious as well as those for whom the change is complete or otherwise inactive. In contrast, the children and adolescents use the conservative variant as a sociolinguistic stereotype. This pattern suggests that the classical sociolinguistic definition of speech community may be inadequate.

Since the discourses of television commercials are transposed and transformed variants of the discourses of the host society, the voices of the commercial in a diglossic society such as German-speaking Switzerland offer an interesting perspective on the sociolinguistic aspects of diglossia. Variation between High German and localized Swiss German in a corpus of television commercials is analyzed here with respect to its role in the mediation of messages concerning genre, product type, product image, audience and related factors. The most important factor associated with variation is the structure of the commercial itself, the Comment voice being dominated by High German, the Action component by Swiss varieties. However, patterns of variation are far from straightforward. The Comment voice in particular articulates with local discursive practices in complex ways. Variation is involved in the mediation of different meaning potentials, different ‘ways of speaking’.There are reflexes here of ongoing changes in the relationship between High German and local varieties in Switzerland.

Previous studies on the perception of language prosody and dialectal prosody have shown that languages and regional dialects can be identified by prosodic cues alone. This pilot study tests this for 4 Swiss German dialects. 70 participants were presented with filtered speech material devoid of segmental cues. The filter was applied for frequencies between 250 Hz.7000 Hz. Despite this filtering, 3 of 4 dialects were recognized by the participants. Identification rates were considerably higher for dialects which present distinct prosodic features, in this case relatively slow speech rate in one instance and high pitch range in the other.

Stops in Swiss German contrast only in quantity in all word positions; aspiration and voicing play no role. As in most languages with consonant quantity contrast, geminate stops are produced with significantly longer closure duration (CD) than singletons in an intersonorant context. This holds word medially as well as phrase medially, e.g., [oni tto:sə] "without roar" versus [oni to:sə] "without can." Since the stops are voiceless, no CD clue distinguishes geminates from singletons phrase initially. Nevertheless, do speakers utilize articulatory means to maintain the contrast? By using electropalatography, the articulatory and acoustic properties of word-initial alveolar stops were investigated in phrase-initial and phrase-medial contexts. The results are threefold. First, as expected, CD and contact duration of the articulators mirror each other within a phrase: Geminates are longer than singletons. Second, phrase initially, the contact data unequivocally establish a quantity distinction. This means that - even without acoustic CD cues for perception - geminates are articulated with substantially longer oral closure than singletons. Third, stops are longer in phrase-initial than phrase-medial position, indicating articulatory strengthening. Nevertheless, the difference between geminates and singletons phrase initially is proportionately less than in phrase-medial position.

This chapter reports about various doubling phenomena that are attested in the Alemannic dialect. It presents two instances of 'morphological doubling'. These are shown to be instances of doubling (of identical morphological material) in order to compensate a lack in the inflectional paradigm., i.e., where two identical inflectional elements occur twice within one (extended) projection. The chapter shows that the identity of the inflectional morpheme is the result of a repair strategy. It discusses tun-insertion, preposition doubling, and doubly filled Comp in some detail. Doubly filled Comp phenomena and preposition doubling (or rather the addition of prepositional adverbs) are shown to not contain superfluous elements; instead these elements overtly indicate positions which are necessary in the clausal architecture and which can be justified independently. The chapter concludes that the doubling phenomena under consideration do not violate economy beside those cases which evolved from interference effects. Keywords: Alemannic dialect; morphological doubling; preposition doubling

This paper compares different measures of graphemic similarity applied to the task of bilingual lexicon induction between a Swiss German dialect and Standard German. The measures have been adapted to this particular language pair by training stochastic transducers with the Expectation-Maximisation algorithm or by using hand-made transduction rules. These adaptive metrics show up to 11% F-measure improvement over a static metric like Levenshtein distance.

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. Apps have been used to train acoustic models for automatic speech recognition (de Vries et al. 2014) and to archive endangered languages (Iwaidja Inyaman Team 2012). Leemann and Kolly (2013) developed a free app for iOS—Dialakt App (DA) (>78k downloads)—to document language change in Swiss German. Here, we present results of sound change based on DA data. DA predicts the users’ dialects: for 16 variables, users select their dialectal variant. DA then tells users which dialect they speak. Underlying this prediction are maps from the Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS, 1962-2003), which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. If predicted wrongly, users indicate their actual dialect. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Results revealed robustness of phonetic variables; lexical and morphological variables were more prone to change. Phonetic variables like to lift (variants: /lupfə, lʏpfə, lipfə/) revealed SDS agreement scores of nearly 85%, i.e., little sound change. Not all phonetic variables are equally robust: ladle (variants: /xaelə, xaellə, xaeuə, xaeɫə, xaeɫɫə/) exhibited significant sound change. We will illustrate the results using maps that show details of the sound changes at hand.

Switzerland has four language areas: a German, a French, an Italian, and a Romansch area. The German-speaking population, using an Alemannic dialect in everyday communication, is the largest language group. In French-speaking Switzerland the dialects have, due to negative stereotypes, almost died out. Around half of the Italian-speaking inhabitants in Switzerland are Italian immigrants, who have settled in all the linguistic areas of Switzerland, while the other half lives in the Italian language area in southern Switzerland. The Romansch-speaking population is the smallest language group in Switzerland; the Romansch language is threatened by extinction. Around 20% of Switzerland's population is foreign.

This article is based on a case study of a family with three children who migrated to Australia from German-speaking Switzerland in 1984. It was found that within less than ten years, Swiss-German was substituted by English as the language in the home and today the younger generation use Swiss-German exclusively for communication with their relatives in Switzerland. The article retraces this change in language use and examines how the members of the family recall the language shift and make sense of it. The findings are discussed in terms of the roles played by the family members (in particular by the mother) and in terms of the family's language background.

Three possible constructions of adverbially complemented noun phrases are attested in Swiss German. In (1), the indefinite article is doubled, whereas in (2) and (3) the article appears only once; it precedes or follows the adverb, respectively: (1) Also d' Susi wär e ganz e liebi Frau für de Markus! So the Susi would_be Art really Art lovely wife for the Markus! 'Susi would be a really lovely wife for Markus!' (2) Also d' Susi wär ganz e liebi Frau für de Markus! So the Susi would_be really Art lovely wife for the Markus! 'Susi would be a really lovely wife for Markus!' (3) Also d' Susi wär e ganz liebi Frau für de Markus! So the Susi would_be Art really lovely wife for the Markus! 'Susi would be a really lovely wife for Markus!' Doubling of the indefinite article is quite often mentioned in dialectological literature. Unfortunately there is nothing to be found about regional differences, frequency or possible contexts for a doubling in most standard works of Swiss German dialectology. The present paper now fills in some of these gaps in research on the adverbially complemented noun phrase in Swiss German: In a quantitative analysis will be shown that the construction with the article between adverb and adjective (2) is the one given the highest acceptance and preference rates by the informants. Furthermore the paper also shows that the doubling-construction (1) is more prominent in some Swiss German speaking-areas than in others. An apparent time analysis reveals ongoing language change and, last but not least, it shows that sociolinguistic parameters have an impact on the adverbially complemented noun phrase as well.

In some Swiss German dialects, wh-questions can show the wh-word at the end of the sentence in addition to its 'normal' sentence initial position. This phenomenon called wh-doubling raises some puzzling questions for linguistic theories, such as: what kind of processes are involved in wh-doubling (syntactic, phonological)? Does wh-doubling enrich the poor left periphery of Swiss German? Why do speakers use an additional wh-word that seems to be absolutely superfluous? I will argue that wh-doubling depends on the information structure of the question, more specifically on the function of the wh-word as a focus constituent. Wh-doubling is also used in a special type of rhetorical questions in Swiss High German where in addition to doubling wh-words undergo diminutive formation and reduplication. My paper pursues two main goals: (i) to give a detailed description of wh-doubling constructions with regard to geographical distribution and question type (rhetorical, alternative, echo etc.); (ii) to present syntactic analyses of similar wh-doubling phenomena in other languages considering their application to Swiss German data.

In this paper, I will show that the investigation of passive constructions by means of written questionnaires ('Projekt Dialektsyntax des Schweizerdeutschen', University of Zurich) provides reliable data on Swiss German dialect syntax. Concerning the accusative passive, I will illustrate that the auxiliaries 'kommen' or 'werden' and inflected or uninflected past participles are found in geographically distinct areas. Our material shows a similar geographical distribution of variants as the data from traditional direct interviews. Since we have been working with several consultants at each place, it is possible to give a picture of the gradual nature of the transition from one to another variant. The distribution of the passive constructions fits more general, North-South-oriented dialect-geographical patterns (cf. Hotzenköcherle 1986) that are well-known from other syntactic phenomena (such as the inflection of the predicative adjective (SDS III 256), of copredicative and resultative constructions (Bucheli Berger/Glaser (2004), Bucheli Berger (2005)). The evidence concerning the dative passive (recipient passive) leads me to the conclusion that its existence is not beyond any doubt in Swiss German. Beside the different passive constructions, I will also discuss the geographical distribution of alternative constructions such as active, 'tun'-periphrasis, etc.

This paper is concerned with the question, whether the status of Standard German in German-speaking Switzerland is adequately described as that of a foreign language. It discusses typological aspects, language awareness and language ideologies among German-speaking Swiss people, the practice of language acquisition, the language use in private life and media and the linguistic discourse about the relationship between the use of Swiss German and Standard German. It argues that from a linguistic point of view in none of these fields a clear decision can be made whether Standard German is a foreign language or not. Thus, the authors suggest that the conceptual framework ought to be widened to adequately describe the status of Standard German in German-speaking Switzerland. Finally, they take occasion to develop the concept of "Sekundärsprache"/"secondary language" for language situations similar to that in German-speaking Switzerland.

Languages, like organic species can be classified into groups and subgroups … Dominant languages and dialects spread and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex The lure of English has not left us. And until it goes, our own languages will remain paupers. Mohandas Gandhi (1965) Stable and unstable language arrangements One of the hallmarks of diglossia is its stability over long periods of time, a feature it shares with grassroots bilingualism. In both cases the population is territorially stationary, exhibiting no abrupt changes in residence patterns or language choice. If we think, for example, of German-speaking Switzerland, the Basque country and Jammu, north-west India, the language scenarios of these regions have lasted for many generations. No uncertainties or challenges undermined the alternating language-choice conventions for Swiss German/High German, Basque/Spanish and Pashto/Urdu. Stability is a rather vague notion. If, for present purposes, it is defined to mean that nobody alive remembers different language-choice conventions, it implies that basic patterns have been in place for at least four generations. In this sense the three cases, different though they are in terms of sociogenesis and functional allocation of codes, exemplify stable language arrangements. However, the stability of multilingual arrangements is by no means the rule. Around the globe speech communities live in close proximity, influencing each other. From a language-centred point of view as suggested by Darwin's above-quoted analogy, languages influence each other, expand, contract or die.