LanguagePolicyinMultilingualSwitzerland-eDoc.PDFVIP

Language Policy in Multilingual Switzerland: Overview and Recent Developments Paper presented at the Cicle de confèrencies sobre política lingüística Direcció general de política lingüística Barcelona, 4 December 1998 François Grin1 1. Introduction Switzerland is often quoted as a success story for its handling of linguistic and cultural diversity. In this presentation, I will try to assess this success: to what extent is this reputation justified? What are the conditions that have resulted in this very particular way of dealing with diversity in a multilingual state? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the “Swiss model”? Since time and space are too limited to engage in a full-fledged historical, political, socio- linguistic and economic assessment of Swiss quadrilingualism, let alone in a comparative discussion, I will eschew the usual presentation of demo- and sociolinguistic data in favour of a more interpretative approach, with the aim to provide the reader with an analytical, rather than descriptive perspective on Swiss multilingualism today. Much relevant detail will have to be omitted, meaning that this text will concentrate on what I consider to be the essential di- mensions of the problem. However, additional information (including an array of relevant figures) can be found in the references listed at the end of this paper. This paper is organised as follows. In Section 2, I review the historical foundations of Swiss multilingualism; the corresponding institutional arrangements are presented in Section 3; Section 4 is