This project – a collaboration between S. Madikeri (Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich) and N. Dherbey Chapuis – aims to attain an error rate of approximately 20 percent in automatic transcriptions of audio recordings; at present, AI-generated transcriptions (e.g. Whisper, Microsoft) have an error rate of nearly 50 percent. In a second step, the transcripts will be corrected by hand.

International and Swiss studies alike have shown that early language promotion in the context of pre-school settings has a positive impact on a child’s scholastic success. In view of the current state of research and the various challenges facing professionals in early education, however, many questions remain unanswered and further research findings are needed. One question addresses the transition from the family to pre-school settings like day care centres.

Two-thirds of all Rhaeto-Romanic speakers live outside the Rhaeto-Romanic homeland, yet the specific linguistic conditions for Romansh speakers outside the traditional language region have not yet been studied in detail.

Comparatively little research has been conducted on how adult migrants – both those with low literacy skills (non-literates) and those who have competence in a non-Latin alphabet (non-roman alphabet literates) – acquire reading and writing skills, and scholarly findings on the subject are correspondingly sparse. This condition is all the more surprising as specialist discourse on the topic of “literacy levels in adults” has long revealed that traditional differentiations between so-called...

This research project performs a retrospective analysis of the challenges posed by Swiss multilingualism during the Covid-19 pandemic. Continuous communication with the population is necessary in times of crisis – indeed, communication is an essential aspect of crisis management, be it to provide information about the current situation, health issues and distancing rules, or to explain work-related rights and obligations, access to emergency financial aid, and even educational matters....

After the positive outcome of the first Cantonal Integration Programme (CIP), the Confederation commissioned the cantons to implement the second CIP (running from 2018 to 2021). Considering that not all migrants have the same needs and requirements with regard to second language acquisition, Fribourg's offer for language courses is to be assessed as part of the second CIP. The assessment is carried out by the Institute of multilingualism, on behalf the Migrant Integration Office and...

Lusophonia embraces different kind of groups and people.  If they share the Portuguese language, on the one hand, they do not share the same historical position on the other. This project on language, identity and labour migration attempts to fill the existing gap in sociolinguistic and migration studies about Lusophone postcolonial relations, but outside Portugal and its former colonies.

This collaborative project aims at moving beyond common and acritical assumptions about capitalism and language that tend to take them for granted, without sufficiently interrogating their historical development, their heterogeneous manifestations in time and space, or their complicated interrelationship. We believe instead that a thorough exploration of the co-relation of language and capitalism is needed in order to grasp how, where, why, to what extent, with what consequences, and...

The Cold Rush project examines the transforming Arctic North as an expanding hotspot at the juncture of economic development and cultural transformation, focusing on the ways in which language and identity matter in these processes.

Literacy courses designed for adult migrants have been offered for decades in countries experiencing significant immigration. The recent past has seen an increase in research on the teaching and learning processes that are involved in successful and sustainable literacy development for adult migrants in a non-native language and that therefore should be taken into account in literacy classes; nevertheless, significant research gaps remain. Current practice in literacy development for...