Abstract ID: 959
Part of Session 125: The legitimate speaker in a transforming political economy (Other abstracts in this session)
Authors: Zimmermann, Martina
Submitted by: Zimmermann, Martina (University of Bern, Switzerland)
In Switzerland, which consists of largely monolingual regions mirrored in the territoriality principle, universities existed for a long time only in the French and German parts. The economic and cultural weakness of the Italian speaking part (Ticino) was both an obstacle to the establishment of a university as well as a consequence of the non-existence of such an institution. The global economic transformation in the nineties implicated a political willpower to upvalue the region economically and led to the foundation of university in the Italian part of the country in 1996. The “Università della Svizzera Italiana” (USI), with a focus on economics and with English and Italian as the two official languages, defines itself as an institution that serves as a bridge between northern Italy and the rest of Switzerland, with the goal of defending and preserving the language and culture of the Ticino.
This economic transformation has had an impact on the language ideologies of the region’s inhabitants and has offered new economic possibilities and personal options. Despite the opportunity to study in the Ticino, some still choose to migrate i.e., to study at a university in the German part of Switzerland. It is in this context that I am doing an ethnography of a student association of Ticino-dialect/Italian-speaking members, established in the German part in order to investigate which students make their choice in relation to which interests – economic (high fees of USI, high living cost somewhere else) or strategic ones (future chances on the labour market) amongst others. While to some extent, those going away become “disloyal” with the Ticino and its academic offer, in their student associations (considered as social spaces that offer a social and cultural network), a form of loyalty towards region and culture can be cultivated whilst being away. In this context tension thus emerges oscillating between disloyalty (going away – distancing oneself from the Ticino) and loyalty (constructing oneself as a legitimate member of a Ticino dialect/Italian-speaking student association where one can celebrate elements from the Ticino together with other students who share the same origin and culture while being away).
It is the aim of my paper to understand how the internal student migrants in this context legitimize their disloyalty and at the same time practice and justify their loyalty towards their home region and culture on the terrain of different languages and how they construct themselves through these practices as legitimate members of the Ticinese community in the Swiss German diaspora. By a critical analysis of the ethnographic data, I will first argue that languages work as distinctive community features in the context of a mobile group of students (Ticino dialect/Italian distinguish this association from others and enable the individuals to construct themselves as legitimate members). Second I will show how the diglossic situation (Swiss German/Standard German) is highlighted in a discourse of minorisation and social exclusion as well as how it is instrumentalized (future chances on the labour market).