The "Filière Bilingue" (FiBi) is a Swiss public two-way immersion program integrating French-speaking, German-speaking and allophone learners (having neither French nor German as an L1) in each class. Located in the bilingual city of Biel/ Bienne, the "diglossic" situation represented by the use of Swiss German and standard…

This report, written in French and German, provides an evaluation of a pilot program, begun during the 1999-2000 school year, in which Kindergarten students (aged 5 to 6 years) in the French-speaking town of Cressier and the German-speaking town of Jeuss-Lurtigen-Salvenach, both in the bilingual Fribourg/Freiburg Canton of Switzerland,received 10%…

A discussion of multilingualism in Switzerland begins with a description of the country's linguistic characteristics. Historical Swiss policy recognizing four official languages, one of which (Romansch) is spoken by very few people, is compared with the current situation in which internal and external migration and multilingualism are common. The…

This paper examines efforts to save rapidly declining indigenous languages around the world. The entire process of language preservation and revitalization is a massive undertaking that requires immense long-term planning and support. These problems extend well beyond the linguistic concerns of the language itself. Language policy is inherently…