How do I find out if a train is wheelchair-friendly? Should I talk about my "disability" at job interviews? What types of educational support are available for disabled children, and who should I contact to apply for it? Are the toilets in this restaurant accessible? To find answers to these kinds of questions, people with disabilities develop a range of social and linguistic practices that are often unknown to the general public, as do their friends and family.

The 19th century saw a proliferation of scientific documentary works contributing to the production of knowledge about languages and their speakers around the world. These included linguistic corpora, ethnographic reports, maps and language statistics comprising a set of research data which was subsequently used by Western governments to define geopolitical borders, to legitimize the construction of nations and to determine those language practices that would come to be recognised as...

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....

This exploratory project addresses the question of the origins of individual differences in language aptitude, at different levels of language processing including but not limited to native language phonological, lexical and syntactic processing. This question will be addressed across different levels of multilingual language experience (i.e. in monolinguals, bilinguals and polyglots), in line with the idea that extreme giftedness, healthy  variability and at least some disorders...

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...

How can inequalities (in terms of social class, language, ability, race, gender) be addressed in the classroom by focussing on social processes and encouraging students to reflect on possible ways of challenging them? This question is explored in the project carried out in collaboration with the University of Teacher Education Fribourg.

The aim of this research project is to highlight the emergence and development of the Esperantist discourse and movement in Switzerland, in connection with its characteristic sociopolitical and discursive conditions: neutrality and multilingualism. In addition, the project examines how the sociopolitical and discursive conditions specific to Switzerland contribute to the positioning of Swiss Esperantists within the global Esperanto movement.

In cooperation with the University of Lausanne UNIL

In Switzerland’s political dialogue, an adequate representation of Swiss language communities in the Federal Administration is considered to be a vital expression of multilingualism in Switzerland. Diverse legal bases and directives have been created and issued in the interest of reaching this goal.