Felicity Rash

The German-Romance Language Borders in Switzerland.

This paper is concerned with language-contact phenomena at the borders of Switzerlands four language communities (German, French, Italian and Romansh), the legal status of the four Swiss national languages, and the language policies of individual bilingual and trilingual cantons. The historical movements of the language boundaries will be described; linguistic interference resulting from direct language contact at each of the language boundaries will be described in some detail; and recent research into linguistic cleavage and language attitudes will be summarised.

Images of the Self and the Other in Paul Rohrbach's ‘German Idea’

ABSTRACT Rash presents the results of a close linguistic analysis of the 1912 monograph Der deutsche Gedanke in der Welt (The German Idea in the World) by the German political journalist and economist Paul Rohrbach (1869–1956). Rohrbachs monograph is a 250-page tract expressing nationalist and expansionist sentiments. It compares the British, as experienced players on the world stage, with the Germans, who were, in 1912, still hoping to join Britain (or ‘England’ as Rohrbach usually had it) as a Weltvolk, a ‘world people’ or ‘world power’, with equal rights and responsibilities. Rash adopts the methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) devised for qualitative analysis by Paul Baker and his colleagues.

German Images of the Self and the Other

Foreword Methodological Framework Self-identity, Otherness and Nationalism Racism in Discourse Anti-Semitism in Discourse Colonialism in Discourse Discourse in War-Time Conclusion

German nationalist and colonial discourse: an introduction

The collection of articles presented in this volume is the fruit of an initial workshop that took place at the joint conference of the Forum for German Language Studies, the German Linguistics Annual Conference and Studies in the History of the English Language held from 29 April to 3 May 2009 in Banff, Canada. A subsequently formed working group, interested in historical nationalist and antisemitic discourses, met for the first time in November 2009 at Queen Mary, University of London, where a three-year project on nationalist and antisemitic discourse during the German Second Reich (1871 1918) is currently being funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The articles in this volume focus on the long-term development of national identity and historical precursors to the National Socialist frameworks that emerged after the First World War. More specifically, they focus on German definitions of sovereignty and state, the gendered nature of German national identity, and the influence of colonial expansion on the formation of both a racialist German identity as well as on lasting images of other Europeans, such as the British and the Polish. An abiding theme throughout is the difference, as perceived from the German perspective, between the Self and the ‘outsider’ or Other. A number of the articles share a methodology informed by Ruth Wodak and her colleagues’ discourse historical approach (DHA), supported, where appropriate, by a digitally assisted corpus-based approach. DHA looks on discourse as a social action with social and political consequences, and as having a particular role in the development and maintenance of power structures in societies. It advocates interdisciplinarity and intertextuality, indeed any linguistic or sociological methodology that can help expose the effects of ideology on discourse, as well as discourse on ideology. DHA can particularly shed light on the discourse strategies and argumentation topoi used in the service of those ideologies that are motivated by power, political control, domination and discrimination. One of the most important methodologies that supports DHA is cognitive metaphor analysis, which provided significant results for several studies in this collection. Felicity Rash’s article examines a text by one of the most important procolonial nationalists of the Second Reich. She concentrates on the author’s

Language-use as a theme in German-language Swiss literature

This article explores the treatment of the theme of language-use in germanophone Swiss fiction.1 I aim to show that the frequency with which this theme manifests itself in literature reflects a widespread interest in linguistic issues on the part of the German-speaking Swiss. The views on language expressed by literary characters discussed in this article are, in fact, no different from those voiced by the real-life Swiss - and most Swiss fiction is about Swiss characters. That the germanophone Swiss give so much attention to linguistic issues testifies to their sensitivity to the social function of language-use as well as to their respect for tradition. The ability to use language according to prescribed conventions is seen as more than merely desirable; it is recognized as a vital requirement of social cohesion and national identity. I conclude that the Swiss preoccupation with language has a political dimension. The unique linguistic situation of German-speaking Switzerland - that of a diglossic German-language community within a multilingual nation - is used by the germanophone Swiss as a means of asserting their individuality among other German-speaking populations.

French and Italian lexical influences in German-speaking Switzerland (1550-1650)

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.