Hauptinhalt

Beat Siebenhaar: Die deutschen Sprachinseln auf den Jurahöhen der französischsprachigen Schweiz

The pilot project described here investigates the linguistic situation in the German-speaking settlements on the mountain peaks in the French-speaking areas of the Bernese Jura and Canton Jura. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Baptists, fleeing from persecution by the Bernese authorities, were allowed to settle in these areas, which belonged to the territories ruled by the prince-bishop of Basle. On the basis of a dozen interviews with predominantly elderly inhabitants of the region, a picture of the contemporary linguistic situation is provided and the regional affiliations of the dialect are demonstrated by means of phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical analyses.

The linguistic enclaves described here are in a peculiar situation both within the context of Berne and in that of Switzerland itself in that they represent the language of the majority (German-speaking) group in the territory of the (French-speaking) minority. In addition, the linguistic boundary between French and German is only twenty kilometres away from the linguistic enclaves and there is contact with the rest of German-speaking Switzerland.

The German-speaking inhabitants of the Jura interviewed in the present survey had a positive attitude towards bilingualism. This is a contrast to the position which must have been current one or two generations ago, when the reclusive Baptist communities would have regarded French as the language of a sinful outside world. Nowadays, the sense of linguistic separateness has almost entirely ceased to be a factor defining Mennonite identity, and, consequently, the religious community is now bilingual. The use of German has thus lost its function as a mark of separation from outsiders, though German remains the first language and the language of prayer for the majority of the inhabitants of the linguistic enclaves of the Jura. Within the enclaves themselves, German remains a source of identity.