Rural-urban Nexus in Language Policy and Practice – The Swiss Case Study

In multilingual societies such as Switzerland, education plays a central role in sustaining linguistic diversity, fostering social cohesion, and enabling young people’s participation in democratic and culturally diverse futures. Multilingualism in Switzerland unfolds across societal, institutional and everyday domains, involving four national languages alongside regional varieties, migrant and family languages (Krompák, 2024). Young people engage with this diversity through complex linguistic and semiotic repertoires in school, home, and digitally mediated contexts. Their everyday multilingual and multimodal practices offer insights into how language policies are experienced and negotiated from below, and how education recognizes – or fails to recognize – youth linguistic resources as assets for participation, agency and inclusion.

This contribution forms part of the Horizon Europe project MultiLX – Strategies to strengthen European linguistic capital in a globalised world (2025–2027). Focusing on the Swiss case study, it examines how young people mobilize multilingual, multimodal and digital resources across physical and virtual spaces, and how these practices relate to language policy in school and family contexts (Spolsky, 2004). Drawing on research on language ideologies and language policy, the study conceptualizes language use as embedded in normative orders, power relations and institutional regimes that shape language legitimacy (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994; Kamusella, 2012).

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, ethnographic approach based on fieldwork conducted between autumn 2025 and spring 2026 in school contexts in four Swiss cantons: Ticino, Geneva, Graubünden and Lucerne. Data include participant observation, fieldnotes, short interviews with students and teachers, and multimodal materials generated through lifescapes (Krompák, 2025) and mediagrams (Lexander & Androutsopoulos, 2023), with young people involved as co-researchers contributing visual and digital artefacts (Holm, 2018). Preliminary analyses reveal both shared and context-specific patterns in how young people mobilize multilingual and multimodal repertoires across educational environments: Ticino reflects a more rural context with Italian as the dominant language of schooling, Geneva an urban and highly diverse linguistic ecology, while the comparison between Graubünden and Lucerne highlights the rural–urban nexus, legitimate and illegitimate language discourses, and the educational transmission of Romansh as an endangered language.

• Referierende: Edina Krompák, Victoria Wasner & Lindita Bakii