Alemannisch und der Deutschunterricht: Schweizerdeutschdebatten in der Schweizer Schule seit 1950

In this contribution, I describe the evolution of the role that Alemannic dialects and Standard High German play in the Swiss German educational context. Drawing on a content analysis of a collection of school-related documents from 1950 to 2014, I describe the change in the roles attributed to dialects and the standard language, respectively. The task of German-language education shifts from the two-fold goal of teaching standard-language literacy and cultivating the “pure” dialect in the 1950s to a clear prioritization of standard language skills both in orality and in literacy towards the end of the twentieth century. I discuss these changes in relation to the backdrop of the media discourse on identity, language, multilingual education, language norms, and other social issues such as migration.