The Role of a Dialect as a Means of the Swiss Linguistic Personality Identification

Abstract

The aim of the study is to reveal the role of the dialect as a means of identifying the Swiss. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the interest of modern German studies in the dialect situation in German-speaking Switzerland. Dialects, as one of the forms of the German language existence in Switzerland, are an important attribute of the Swiss ethnic culture, determine the ethnic worldview of the Swiss linguistic personalities, and act as a representative of the national and cultural values of the Swiss ethnic group. As a result of the study, the features of the interaction of the German literary language and the Alemannic territorial dialects in the discursive space of Switzerland were characterized; the features of the Swiss linguistic personality at the verbal-semantic, cognitive and pragmatic levels were determined; the characteristic features of the worldview of the German-Swiss were considered: anthropocentrism, concreteness and practical orientation of the world perception, closeness to nature and fauna. In the course of the study, the ethnocultural role of the Swiss dialectisms in the mass media discourse was revealed; the functions of dialect vocabulary in the headlines and texts of the Swiss newspaper articles were determined; the potential of the dialect as a symbol of national and regional identification in different types of the Swiss discourse was established. The results of the analysis of the functional potential of the dialect in German-speaking Switzerland outlined further prospects for the existence of territorial dialects in the ethno-cultural space of Switzerland and determined the patterns of formation and development of the Swiss German, taking into account the role of the dialect as an identifying marker of the Swiss linguistic personalities.

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: January 8, 2023.
• Published: February 28, 2023.

Keywords

• швейцарский национальный вариант немецкого языка
• языковая личность
• дискурс
• дискурсивные практики
• швейцарские диалекты
• Swiss German
• linguistic personality
• discourse
• discursive practices
• Swiss dialects

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