Language maintenance and shift in a Swiss community on the Black Sea

Abstract This paper explores the dynamics of the linguistic situation in a Swiss colony of Shabo on the Black Sea, created in 1822. Its political belonging changed several times: from the Russian empire to the Kingdom of Romania and the USSR (today Ukraine). Metalinguistic discourse produced by various social actors in different sociopolitical settings is compared here to the use of Francoprovençal, French, and Russian as discovered in archival data. Accordingly, the study is based, on the one hand, on the narratives in manuscripts and publications (from the Archives of Odessa, Bern, and Romainmôtiers), and on the other hand, on a corpus of private letters (from family archives in Vaud), as well as early (socio)linguistic descriptions compared to linguistic data collected in Vaud. This case study aims to shed light on the complex relationship between the linguistic processes and language ideologies in changing socio-political spaces.