On 1 April 2017, Guido Seiler is going to give a talk on Language Structure as a Mirror of Social Structure? The Case of the Shwitzer Language of Adams County, IN at the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Details can be found on the poster below.
Anita Auer and Alexandra Derungs discussed the fate of Glarnertüütsch in North America during a talk in Hotel Glarnerhof, Glarus (CH) on Sunday, 29 January 2017 at 3pm. This Glarnertüütsch-Stubete, which was organised by the Academia Glaronensis, was attended by many dialect enthusiasts, and it also received some media attention in the local papers:
Südostschweiz Zeitung 28 January 2017 and 30 January 2017
Glarner Woche 1 February 2017
Anita Auer, Aris Xanthos (UNIL) and Daniel Gatica-Perez (EPFL) have been awarded a CROSS (Collaborative Research on Science and Society) grant for their project « Multimodal Linguistic Crowdsourcing: Tracing Swiss Heritage Speakers’ Identities in North America ».
This project aims to capture the language use and cultural practices of Swiss German emigrants in Wisconsin (US) by way of a multimodal crowdsourcing app. The reflections of Swiss identities abroad – from the nineteenth century to the present day – can be found in different modes such as emigrant letters, early printed newspapers, diaries, recordings of mid-20th-century interviews as well as interviews carried out today, and the surroundings/landscape, e.g. Swiss German signs, Swiss architecture. The purpose-built app will allow the so-called “heritage speakers” to capture all of these different aspects of their Swiss heritage, which can be done by taking geo-localized pictures, recording themselves or others, and filling in questionnaires. The researchers will, with the help of the heritage speakers, propose quality guidelines for the different processes (data collection, curation, and labeling) that are involved in the crowdsourcing part of the project.
Following their recent field trip to Wisconsin (November 2016) to interview Swiss heritage speakers and to unearth some old letters, newspapers, travel reports, etc., Anita and Alex themselves were interviewed about their fieldwork experiences by Jo Fahy (Swissinfo). The podcast is available here: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/podcast_language-connects-swiss-migrants-to-home/42785380
Our expert on Francoprovençal in the SINA research network – Jonathan Kasstan – discusses efforts to keep Francoprovençal alive in this interesting article: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/opinion_what-future-for-francoproven%C3%A7al-/41754666
Read this interesting article about the Swiss Amish of Adams County, Indiana, and the important role that yodeling plays in their language use: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-interamish-language-barriers-of-indiana