When globalese meets localese: transformational tactics in the typographic landscape – a Bernese case study

ABSTRACT

This paper examines an annual anti-racism event in Bern, Switzerland, which, in 2016, was promoted with three posters designed around a distinctive kind of multimodal writing. In large black and white lettering, the posters voiced real and imagined immigrants in one of three statements including ĭ ŗĕđä õ ɓæřŋ d’űţśĉħ (I also speak Bernese). Each poster thereby combined the regional dialect of Swiss German (not usually written in official settings) with ostensibly nonsensical foreign diacritics. Drawing on interviews with the poster designer and the city administrator responsible for organizing the anti-racism campaign, I argue that it is the contrapuntal mixing of semiotic resources which is central to the political force of the posters. Superficially, their destandardized, embellished orthography bears the hallmarks of, inter alia, globalese, and “new writing.” However, the rhetorical impact of the posters lies precisely in the pointed, simultaneous deployment of a recognizable form of localese and in the skilful balancing of visual style and verbal substance. As such, and while complicating a number of common binaries in linguistic landscapes scholarship, this case study demonstrates the tactical intervention of an accomplished wordsmith in transforming or rewriting the city's typographic but also cultural landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Bernese
• Swiss German
• linguistic landscape
• global semioscape
• typography/orthography
• anti-racism campaign

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I acknowledge the collaborative engagement of Sabrina Subašić who, as my research assistant, was instrumental in giving shape to this project through her interviews with both the city official in charge of the Bern gegen Rassismus campaign and the designer of the 2016 posters. Speaking of which, I am very grateful to both Marianne Helfer and Sarah von Rickenbach for talking about and sharing their work with us. My initial ideas for this paper were first presented at the 9th Linguistic Landscape Workshop, University of Luxemboug, March 2017; at this time, I was fortunate to receive from Adam Jaworski some ideas which have been instrumental in shaping the current paper. For her additional help and ideas, I thank Jamie Karnik; and for his ongoing help with my Bernese, I thank my husband Jürg Koch. Finally, I thank the special issue editors and Jürgen Spitzmüller (as reviewer) for their thoughtful, useful suggestions for improvements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributor

Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication in the Department of English at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His academic profile is at: www.crispinthurlow.net.

Notes

1 Along with a photo gallery, the official Bern gegen Rassismus website can be found here: https://www.bern.ch/themen/auslanderinnen-und-auslander/integration-und-migration/diskriminierung-und-rassismus/bern-gegen-rassismus.

2 Copies of the three posters from the 2016 campaign are available to download here: https://www.bern.ch/mediencenter/medienmitteilungen/aktuell_ptk/stadt-bern-gegen-rassismus-i-bi-hie-deheime/r/plakatserie-aktionswoche-gegen-rassismus-2016.pdf/view.

3 Additional research on the political economies of language/s (including English) in Switzerland are also to be found in Stotz (2006) and Duchêne (2009).

4 From a large-scale corpus of holiday postcards, Heiko Hausendorf and colleagues have started documenting the use of written Swiss German in pre-/non-digital texts; see project website at https://www.ds.uzh.ch/de/projekte/ansichtskartenprojekt.html.

5 Anecdotally, other varieties of Swiss German crop up in similar ways all over so-called German Switzerland, sometimes with orthographic variations which either index locality or simply evidence the non-standardness of orthographic practice (e.g. “häsch xeh?” versus “häsch gseh?”—Eng: Have you seen?) In this regard, Gwynne Mapes (2020) has recently considered the use of the Bündner dialect for performing localness/informality in Swiss food marketing.

6 Brought to my attention by Vanessa Näf, one notable exception is the quasi-official use of Bernese on the ticket machine of the Marzilibahn, a small funicular service between one neighbourhood (Marzili) of Bern and the city centre. In the figure below, the machines instructions are offered in Bernese, Standard German, French and English.

7 Sarah von Rickenbach kindly shared with us her completed project portfolio which is the source of Figure 12, for example.

8 I borrow loosely from de Certeau (1984, e.g. 17) for the distinction between “strategic” and “tactical”. Strategy refers to larger-scale, bottom-down or institutionalised ways in which spaces (or texts) are regulated and structured; tactics are those smaller, bottom-up or agentful ways in which spaces (or texts) may be engaged or resisted. In the current paper, “transformational tactics” is used to indicate relatively small, local, sometimes sporadic actions for change. Technically speaking, though, the posters themselves are strategic in their official purpose however tactical in their design and reach.

9 As one of my reviewers pointed out, these graphetic “games” can be deployed for sinister purposes too, such as the pseudo-Hebrew script used in Fritz Hippler's poster for his infamously anti-Semitic propaganda, Der ewige Jude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_(1940_film).

10 There is evidence of the Bernese posters’ design concept having been taken up further afield in an online poster (see below) against a 2016 anti-immigration initiative brought for a popular vote by the right-wing Swiss People's party; the online poster reads, in English, “Switzerland is also our homeland.”.

11 This Swiss policy on diacritics is explained by the Federal Department of Justice and Police's dependence on a computing system whose restricted character set is in turn structured by standards set by the aptly named International Organization for Standardization.

12 The <š> appears in Finish and Estonian mostly in loan words, but is otherwise a regular feature of EU languages Latvian and Lithuanian and (former/non-EU) Eastern-European languages such as Czech, Serbian and Bulgarian (again, see Busch 2013).