The series Studia Linguistica Germanica, founded in 1968 by Ludwig Erich Schmitt and Stefan Sonderegger, is one of the standard publication organs for German Linguistics. The series aims to cover the whole spectrum of the subject, while concentrating on questions relating to language history and the history of linguistic ideas. It includes works on the historical grammar and semantics of German, on the relationship of language and culture, on the history of language theory, on dialectology, on lexicology / lexicography, text linguisticsand on the location of German in the European linguistic context.

France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

The appearance of Uriel Weinreich's Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (1953) marked a milestone in the study of multilingualism and language contact. Yet until now, few linguists have been aware that its main themes were first laid out in Weinreich’s Columbia University doctoral dissertation of 1951, Research Problems in Bilingualism with Special Reference to Switzerland. Based on the author's fieldwork, it contains a detailed report on language contact in Switzerland in the first half of the 20th century, especially along the French-German linguistic border and between German and Romansh in the canton of Grisons (Graubünden). The present edition reproduces Weinreich's original text in full, with only minor alterations and corrections, as well as the author's fieldwork photographs and many of his hand-drawn diagrams. A new foreword reviews Weinreich's life and legacy, as well as developments in contact linguistics and the Swiss linguistic situation over the past 60 years. With selected comments on noteworthy points and references to more recent literature, this volume will be of interest not only to those working on the languages of Switzerland, or specialists in language contact, but all scholars today whose work builds on the broad and lasting foundations laid over half a century ago by Uriel Weinreich.

After the French Revolution, Switzerland developed from a country in which German dominated linguistically into a confederation of four officially recognized language groups -- German, French, Italian, Romansh -- concentrated in different geographical areas and marked by distinctive cultures and lifestyles. Following a historical overview of this development and the social and political institutionalization of the linguistic cleavages, McRae's study examines key elements in the functioning of modern Swiss society: political parties, federal and cantonal institutions, the media, educational and cultural policies, the relation between the linguistic cleavages and class and religion, the attitudes and behaviour of the four language groups to one another. It concludes by reviewing the various explanations advanced to explain the relative social and political stability of Switzerland. This book is the first volume in a projected multi-volume work examining four multilingual Western democracies. The volumes to come will focus on Belgium (scheduled for publication in 1985), Finland, and Canada.

The current volume brings together sociolinguistic analyses of language contact along the Romance Germanic Language Border, shedding more light on the variable and the universal elements in language contact and shift. It covers the whole range of the border, from French Flanders through South Tirol. Every part of it has been treated by outstanding experts. They describe the current state of the art in 'their' portion of the language border and include information on the legal and/or practical status of the language border and the status and function of all languages concerned. Attitudinal and language planning initiatives as well as the standardisation status of the regionally official and minority languages are discussed. Language borrowing, code switching and other language contact phenomena are analysed in detail.

This book studies the impact of cleavages on electoral choices. Based on a case study of Switzerland, it analyses how cleavages divide voters into voting blocs and how this influences Swiss voting behaviour and the Swiss party system. The first part examines the development of salient cleavages such as religion, social class, rural-urban, and language between 1971 and 2011. Behavioural changes among voters and changes in the size of social groups are explored as explanatory factors for the decline of cleavage voting. The second part proposes a contextual perspective analysis of the current impact of cleavages using both individual and contextual factors. These factors are also combined to examine interaction effects between the individual and the context. Finally, the third part analyses whether the impact of cleavages has harmonised across different contexts (Swiss cantons) over time.

In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard language ideology, the retention of features from Italo-Romance dialects, the standardization of patterns borrowed from English, and the developmental tendencies of standard Italian in Switzerland. The contributions investigate phonetic/phonological, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena, addressed by several empirical methodologies and theoretical vantage points. This work is of interest to scholars and students working on language variation and change, especially those focusing on standard languages and standardization dynamics.