Scientific and quadrilingual: Word of the Year now from the ZHAW
"Filter bubble," "shopping tourist," and "density stress"—words like these have been revealing what makes German-speaking Switzerland tick since 2003. Now, the Swiss Word of the Year is becoming multilingual, interactive, and measurable.
On July 1, 2017, the ZHAW's Department of Applied Linguistics, headed by Daniel Perrin, will take over the sponsorship of the "Word of the Year" institution for Switzerland. Every year, new words are sought that express current social developments particularly succinctly. "Words show what makes us tick - as individuals and as a society," says Perrin.
The Word of the Year has been determined in Germany since 1977 by the German Language Society. An English Word of the Year has been determined since 2004 by scientists from "Oxford Dictionaries", since 2005 separately for "UK" and "US". As early as 2002, however, Daniel Quaderer founded the Word of the Year office in Vaduz, and in 2003, in close cooperation with Radio SRF 3, he announced Switzerland's own Word of the Year for the first time.
The selection of buzzwords such as "Meh Dräck" (2004) and "Asylchaos" (2015) was something to talk about and inspired people to think more alertly about their time and its language, says Quaderer. Jury members such as author Peter Stamm and slam poet Hazel Brugger, as well as columnist Bänz Friedli and word acrobat Nora Zukker, have contributed to the public's interest in the Word of the Year, he says. But the success of the campaign now calls for more: "Thanks to the ZHAW, the scientific foundation of the campaign is now also ensured in Switzerland."
Research and practice together
Starting in 2017, the Word of the Year will be determined jointly by linguists and language practitioners. "We are relying on the new swiss-AL data corpus, which we use at the ZHAW's Department of Applied Linguistics to measure public discourse in Switzerland," says Perrin. In addition, the word of the year will now be determined in all four national languages. And finally, everyone who is interested in language will be able to submit ideas for the next word, the unword and the sentence of the year on an Internet platform.
