"Promoting public understanding" is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the…

This monograph provides an overview of the language situation in Italy, within the framework of language policy and language planning. It presents an account of multilingualism, linguistic diversity, social variation, educational issues and phenomena of language contact both within and outside Italy. The four main threads are (1) the current…