Das Schweizerdeutsche der Rätoroman*innen in der Heimat und im „Unterland“

This project deals with the currently under-researched variety of Swiss German spoken by Romansh people as L2. Applying a sociolinguistic-ethnographic framework, I intend to investigate into the societal processes that determine language variation and change in this variety. The underlying research question is whether different social networks/social structures found for different places (rural and urban) have an effect on communicational patterns or variation in the L2-variety of Swiss German spoken by Romansh people. For this reason, three rural (in the canton of Grisons) and two urban (Zürich and Bern) places will be researched, which vary with respect to various factors such as community size, network strength/density or form of multilingualism. Due to the lack of clear community structures and/or social stratification (in the Labovian sense) in these places, the present work draws from 2nd and 3rd wave approaches, focusing on the speech of single speakers or communities of practice. In total, about 60 speakers (twelve per location) will be interviewed in non-structured sociolinguistic interviews. Analysis of their speech will be done in a mixed-methods approach. Firstly, the relevant social and linguistic variables will be identified qualitatively and secondly, the patterns found will be assessed quantitatively.

KEYWORDS: Swiss German, Bilingualism, inter- and intralinguistic contact, dialect as L2-variety, accommodation, (2nd) dialect acquisition, 2nd and 3rd wave approaches, social dialectology