Switzerland has four official languages, which are distributed according to the “territorial principle”, so that Switzerland consists of four officially monolingual areas. Three of these languages – German, French and Italian – are also spoken in neighbouring countries (Germany/Austria, France and Italy respectively). While there has been some comparative research on linguistic politeness and address in the Swiss varieties and in the respective dominant varieties (e.g. Manno 2005, Schüpbach 2015), comparison of address practices across languages within Switzerland has so far remained anecdotal and the domain of folklinguistic observations in the popular media (e.g. a radio program, several newspaper and magazine articles).

This paper presents a contrastive study of pronominal address in German, French and Italian in Switzerland in a common context. The systematic comparison is based on a corpus of communication by major Swiss retailers aimed at their (prospective) customers – print, TV and in-store advertising and online communication – which is available in the three languages. The paper explores whether there are differences how customers are addressed in the three languages, if so, what these differences are and whether any patterns are emerging.

Preliminary results indicate that – while not consistent – there are indeed differences between the pronominal address practices in the three languages. Overall, T-forms seem to be more frequent in Italian and German than in French where V is more widespread. The role of context, intended audience and medium of communication will be considered and potential reasons for similarities and differences explored.

References

• Manno, Giuseppe. 2005. Politeness in Switzerland: Between respect and acceptance. In: Hickey, Leo and Miranda Stewart (Eds.). Politeness in Europe (pp. 100-115). Clevedon etc.: Multilingual Matters.
• Schüpbach, Doris. 2015. German or Swiss? Address and other routinised formulas in German-speaking Switzerland. In: In: Hajek, John and Yvette Slaughter (Eds.). Challenging the Monolingual Mindset (pp. 63-77). Bristol etc.: Multilingual Matters.