Un siècle de cartographie statistique des langues en Suisse: (dé)faire les frontières avec des chiffres et des idées

The Swiss Federal statistical office (FSO) has published language maps based on statistical data for over a century. Adopting a critical historiographic sociolinguistic approach (Duchêne 2008), I analyse how linguistic boundaries and territories are drawn to understand which sociolinguistic aspects are erased or iconized (Irvine & Gal 2000) throughout the years. Drawing on Bertin's (1973) semiology of graphics, I systematically look at the ways in which cartographers transposed the statistical results on the maps, to show how language territories and boundaries were graphically depicted. The data includes a corpus of maps published by the FSO (1881-2017), which I classified in three periods according to their conditions of production, i.e. the variation of financial, human and technological resources allocated to cartographers. These, along with the methodological constraints of the statistics used to draw the maps, determine how cartographers may represent languages on the Swiss territory. I argue that these language maps are embedded in the language ideological debates of their time, which shape how Switzerland is imagined as a divided and/or united national community of speakers (Anderson 2006).