On the streets of Liestal in Switzerland, a former elementary school teacher gathers signatures to launch a cantonal initiative to teach “clear, linguistically correct, understandable and readable language (klare, sprachlich korrekte, verständliche und lesbare Varietäten) in schools. This seems innocuous, even boring, a bit out of place in a country prizing its many dialects. Next door in Basel they spell trash bag with three B’s and two G’s (Bebbi Sagg), is this a place where people really care about being “correct”? Except “clear, readable speech” is really a call to ban gendered language in a country with a long history of anti-woman politics and the ex-teacher is Sarah Regez, now strategy chief of the youth wing of the conservative SVP or Swiss People’s Party. This is part of her strategy for normalizing the far right.
Regez aims for 1500 signatures to force a public referendum against gendered language in elementary schools, with return to the use of masculine nouns as generic and a ban on anything penetrating individual words: a colon, a hyphen, or the genderstern, the asterisk in Student*in (student) or Bäuer*in (farmer) that makes both genders apparent, which has been recognized by some cantons like Zürich, in some universities, and more broadly against the Geschlechtergerechte Formulieren (gender equitable wording). Basel, the city where Regez is completing her PhD has recognized Geschlechtergerechte Formulieren as a site for the “contribution of real equality” .These are put forward by the Department for Gender Equality, an institution which the SVP wishes to disband. In previous debates about gender which linked dialect to swissness, and gender correct speech to a high german standard. Here, instead they fight for “clarity”. Regez’ Swiss German fights not a standard but gender equality, which the SVP calls “Gender gaga“ and “woke wahn“ (woke craziness). She describes herself as the victim of social pressure to use gender-neutral language at the university, making this a metonym for a nightmare future of leftist hegemony and the Abschaffung der Frau durch die Genderideologie (abolition of the woman through gender ideology). Regez also presents herself as saving children from this world, fighting the “gender monsters” which in her campaign posters are portrayed as a lizardly green arm, with a rainbow armband, reaching out menacingly towards three white children.
Departing from previous discourses opposing gender spelling reforms as standardization and the imposition of language rules from outside, current opposition itself echoes transnational discourses about defending correct language from the “woke university” and its gender politics. Perhaps on Woolard’s characterization of the “salt of the earth” dialect speaker in Singular and Plural is layered a whole set of conservative gender ideologies along with anxieties around spelling and school achievement in a nation with a highly stratified education system where only 27% of 15–19-year-olds are in a high school that grants access to the “woke” university.
Regez plays on these contradictions and anxieties, conducting anti-gender activism in Baselland, a patchwork of arch conservative villages stretching between the left-leaning Basel city and the anthroposophic temple in Dornach. Only a short train ride from the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of Zurich banks or Art Basel, here natural beauty and local dialects are made to stand for tradition and the true Swiss nation. If, following Burdick (2016) where the appropriate mouth for Parisian French was shaped by eating a delicate croissant, contrasted with the dark bread of the Alsatian, we can imagine the Swiss proudly eating a Chäsbängel, a baguette stuffed with fondue that squirts hot cheese all over you when you bite in. That is, the debate about gender neutral language echoes earlier debates around standardization and the attack on local dialects, but it is firmly anchored as well in Swiss gender conservatism.
The SVP, the conservative party where Regez leads the youth wing, has been the most powerful party in the country almost without pause for 30 years. This is particularly the case in gender politics: Switzerland gave women the right to vote nationally only in 1971, equal rights in marriage and joint property in the late 80’s, and equal citizenship rights in 1992. Equal pay rights were passed in 2020, while marriage for all and the right to change gender civilly were granted in 2022.
It seems they still need the department of gender equality. However, the SVP explicitly campaigns to ban the equity department while their youth wing is explicitly anti- “gender gaga”. Regez’s anti-gender language is an instance of circulating “anti-gender ideology” registers (See Borba 2022, Baran & Tebaldi 2023 for more). The multilingual Swiss nation speaks French, a language the far-right Rassembelement National declares is under threat from le wokeisme. Wokeness is seen as a beast attacking the French republic and the farther right Zemmour and inclusive speech is a war machine designed destroy traditional writing: or, more exactly « L’écriture inclusive est une machine de guerre conçue pour détruire l’écriture traditionnelle qui serait le fruit d’une culture patriarcale ». Compared to this, the anger about the loss of the accent circumflex is nothing!
Regez and the SVP however have stronger links to the German speaking far-right. In the powerful far-right party AFD, alternative for Germany, anti-gender inclusive language is framed in the simple, impactful style of their propaganda as Deutch statt Gendern. German not Gender. In posters for the upcoming election, this slogan is strewn over posters around city centers. Their politics declare “Germany, aber normal.” Germany, but normal. Their anti-immigrant, anti-worker discourses clarify who exactly is imagined as Deutsch and as normal.
Last, Regez has been linked to Austrian far right leader Martin Sellner and with him to Swiss far-right party Junge Tat. Sellner is the leader of the Austrian identitarian party, now arguing for “remigration” or the forcible removal of people of color from Austria. The flip side of this is gender politics, a pronatalist call to make women stay home and make more white babies. It is perhaps not suprising Sellner married an American tradwife ( white nationalist anti-feminist) activist Brittany Pettibone. With this the SVP youth wing is leading a dominant party toward the far-right.
Old debates about standardization taken up in new debates about gender and social change, which come to intersect as well with circulating discourses of gender on the far right. These go together like Swiss and chocolate, Swiss and mountains, or Swiss and hidden Nazi gold. Perhaps learning to spell is not so boring after all.