Previous projects

Academic Projects

Postdoctoral project
Elitism and Gender: Performances of social identities in Bernese German. University of Bern, Center for the Study of Language and Society (2021-2022).

There is a wide-spread belief that Switzerland is a ‘class-less society’, meaning that there is little perceived difference between members of socially and economically stratified groups. In an interview with the online news platform SwissInfo, the author of Der Schweizer Knigge, Christoph Stokar (2013), suggests that rich Swiss people do not show off their wealth or behave differently from lower-income citizens, prompting his interviewer to conclude that “[e]litism is an alien concept in a country which runs on consensus and harmony” (Stephens 2013). In the same article, Stokar also asserts that he would not be able to tell if somebody is from an upper-class background simply “from how they talked”.
My research project at the Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS, University of Bern) challenges ideas of (a) the absence of elite performance in Switzerland and (b) the inexistence of a sociolectal linguistic reality in Switzerland. German-speaking Switzerland’s diglossic situation, in which standard German is limited to a few domains, like (national) news broadcasting and the education system (Siebenhaar & Wyler 1997), and non-standard/ standardless dialects are valued highly, has been researched thoroughly. There is substantial work on the ideology of dialect (most notably Watts 1999), on attitudes and language policies of Swiss German versus Standard German (Berthele 2019, Ruoss 2019, Studler 2017, in preparation), or on different perceptions of Swiss dialects (e.g. Leemann, Kolly & Nolan 2015).

However, there is little research surrounding language and social class, or the linguistic and embodied performance of social elite. Although historically, there have been upper-class and lower-class forms of regional varieties, especially in Western towns of German-speaking Switzerland (most famously in Bern and Basel), the academic consensus is that these differences have eroded – often with the lower-class features having been adopted by the social elite. In Bern, for example, the rural and lower-class /l/-vocalization and /nd/-velarization have spread to all social strata, while the uvular R, typical for the ‘Berner Burger’ (the noble patrician families of the city), has been disappearing over time (Siebenhaar 2002). Interestingly, what seems to have remained is a display of higher variability in middle- and upper-class speech, where certain features are used based on specific situations, e.g. the realization of /l/ in public speech versus vocalization in private conversations (Siebenhaar & Wyler 1997).

I thus argue that these differences in linguistic practices can be observed in performative behaviour: Especially performances of power, eliteness and masculinity are promising sites for the expression of social status through linguistic means, bringing to light what participants currently perceive to be the most appropriate sociolectal features to achieve their performative goals. Focusing on speakers from a Bernese fraternity (Studentenverbindung), I look into intra-speaker variation in different settings, such as fraternity meetings, official interviews and dinners with friends or family members. Self-recordings in these different settings are currently analyzed. 

Doctoral project
Tales of Success and Myths of Corruption: Language Ideological Narratives on Tok Pisin and Hawai‘i Creole. University of Bern, English Department (2014-2020).

This study examines how metalinguistic debates on two creoles, Tok Pisin and Hawai‛i Creole, have evolved, adapted to new socio-political and economic circumstances, re-contextualised old (colonial) ideologies, and thereby shaped and established the perceived status, prestige and functions of these languages. My discussion is based on a historiographical analysis (Blommaert 1999a) of (1) written texts, such as newspaper articles, editorials, letters to the editor, official documents, blogs, online fora, etc., and (2) semi-structured interviews with what we could term ‘language workers’ (Thurlow 2019). The results are presented in four analyses (normalisation of ideologies, linguistic diversity and nationalism, legitimisation processes, language commodification), each contrasting and comparing the case of Tok Pisin and Hawai‘i Creole.

Tok Pisin, valued as a common means of communication within the linguistically fragmented state of Papua New Guinea, is regarded as a language that unites the country, but at the same time isolates PNG from the rest of the world. Many Papua New Guineans seem to acknowledge the lingua franca as a marker of identity, and simultaneously reject it as an inferior language to English when it comes to formal (written) language. In contrast, Hawai‛i Creole – often considered a low status variety in the linguistic literature (Tryon and Charpentier 2004, Siegel 2008a) – has become surprisingly productive in creative writing, despite its negative image as ‘broken English’. As part of a general commodification of ‘Pidgin’, this process highlights the importance of the language as a marker of local identity (cf. Roberts 2004, Hiramoto 2011, Higgins 2015).

In both cases, the discrepancy between alleged status and prestige of the creole and the actual language practices can be traced back to attempts to forge a national (PNG) or local (Hawai‛i) identity, particularly strong in the 1970s (and thus likely related to global socio-political processes). In the case of Hawai‛i, this identity conflicted with American nationalism, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. In both cases, myths of the language’s deficiencies (Tok Pisin’s simplicity and HC’s lack of ‘languagehood’) have become normalised and permeate discourses on a mostly subconscious level.