A Country with an Attitude: English in Switzerland

Sa？etak Due to their constructed nature, it can be very difficult to access attitudes towards languages. One methodological approach to do so is a societal treatment study. While societal treatment studies are often criticized because of their informal nature, they are nevertheless considered to be a significant approach as they render it possible to obtain insights into the social meanings and stereotypical associations of language varieties as they examine how languages are treated in society. In order to do so, contents of sources in the public domain are analysed, for example advertisements. Advertisers aim to exploit cultural resonances by using specific languages in order to imbue their products with the stereotypical qualities and values which are commonly associated with a given language group or language. This appropriation of language by advertisers enables researchers to infer people’s attitudes towards certain languages by examining their usage in advertisements of a particular country. As a multilingual country where English has gradually become a second language since it is often used as a lingua franca, Switzerland is remarkably qualified for studying attitudes towards the English language. Hence, this is a diachronic analysis of the changing and differing attitudes towards the English language of people from the three main linguistic regions of Switzerland done by examining the usage of English in advertisements in Swiss newspapers. In order to do so, the analysis pairs a societal treatment study with a questionnaire as another direct approach in order to reassess claims found by the societal treatment study