In line with the growth of linguistically mediated knowledge in the neoliberal new economy, the international health care sector requires some of its workforce to be multilingual, reflecting an increasing multilingualization as a means of economic expansion and localization. Similar to other service-oriented industries that cater to an international audience, language skills and multilingual repertoires mean an added value to the products of health care providers. This invites us to...

At the turn of the century, the globalized economy, the weight of international agencies and transnational migrations have increased the demand for multilingual competences in the workplace. In particular, humanitarian agencies must recruit and train mobile and multilingual skilled workers to deploy their humanitarian missions.

Using the healthcare industry as a site of study, this project aims to uncover the conditions in which particular configurations of language proficiency and speakers become desired commodities, as the demands of globally mobile patients are managed, the needs of migrant patients are accommodated and the linguistic, symbolic and cultural capitals of healthcare workers are regulated and exchanged.

This project aims to present a socio-historical reconstruction of the processes, characteristics and modalities that the Italian language (in its varieties) has undergone in the context of its linguistic contact and integration with German and French-speaking Switzerland.

This project aims to describe the development of productive writing skills in children with a Portuguese immigration background living in Switzerland (in the language of origin and in the language of instruction). It is based on data collected as part of the project Language of origin and language at school: are language skills transferable? (HLC) from the work programme 2011-2015 by the Research Centre on Multilingualism. The project will be divided into three stages: