Date & Place
When: 12 March 2026, 14:15-16:00
Where: F022, Unitobler
This guest lecture is part of the CSLS lecture series "Heritage Languages".
Abstract
According to the latest figures from the Federal Statistical Office, around 1% of the Swiss population aged 15 and over (approx. 60,000 to 70,000 people) regularly use Romansh (Audergon, 2025). It may come as a surprise that, depending on the estimate, more than half of the speakers do not live in the ‘traditional’ language area, but in the so-called Romansh diaspora. This means that they live in German- or Italian-speaking parts of Graubünden, or even abroad or in other cantons of Switzerland, with German-speaking cities being particularly popular places of residence. Outside the traditional area, Romansh is basically a language of origin for children of parents who have migrated from a Romansh-speaking area to a different-language area within Switzerland, although this is hardly ever referred to as such in public discourse.
In the first part of the lecture, the domestic migration of the parent generation will be described in more detail after a brief introduction to Romansh and its sociolinguistic situation. The focus will be on the sociological question of which population groups are particularly mobile and why. In addition, migration will be described not as an abrupt process, but as a gradual one with different stages related to ideological-identity and network-related factors (Büchler, in prep.).
Based on these considerations, the second part examines the transmission of Romansh as a heritage language in German-speaking Switzerland. The starting point here is a qualitative study by the Institute for Cultural Research in Graubünden on the linguistic situation of Romansh-speaking families outside the language area (Cathomas et al., 2024). The results show that the transmission of Romansh is particularly fragile under these conditions, as German dominates most areas of society and there are few opportunities to use Romansh outside the family. At the same time, language practice within the family is of central importance, in particular the quantity of Romansh input and the role of parents who do not speak Romansh as their first language. Building on this, the lecture will discuss current research from an ongoing project on family language policy in Romansh-speaking families in German-speaking Switzerland. The focus will be on how Romansh-speaking families negotiate language transmission in everyday life and what role family language dynamics play in this.
