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Philippe Humbert

In charge of the website of the CeDiLE

+41 26 305 71 64
philippe.humbert@unifr.ch

Research domains

  • Politics and epistemology of language quantification, documentation and cartography

  • Didactics of foreign languages and multilingualism
  • Interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and ethnography
  • Multilingualism and society in Switzerland
  • Francophonie and globalization
  • South Slavic languages in transnational contexts

PhD thesis project

Governing tongues with numbers : a historiographic, ethnographic and interactional analysis of the production of official language statistics in Switzerland
Research projects (contributor)
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Title
Behind the scenes of language quantification
Status
Completed
The purpose of this project is to conduct a detailed analysis on language census issues in Switzerland since the 19th century and to better understand the role this tool plays in the Swiss political landscape. This... more
Title
Counting languages: history, methods and politics of population censuses
Status
Completed
This literature review aims to present an overview of scientific research on the social, political and linguistic issues of language census by analysing international works conducted in various sociopolitical and... more
Title
Questioni di lingue ed indagini statistiche
Status
Completed
In collaboration with the Federal Statistical Office (FSO)In 2010, the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) began conducting an annual population census. The data are mainly gathered from registers of residents, with... more
Publications
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Humbert, Philippe (2019). « Compter les langues pour gouverner : enjeux épistémologiques et conséquences socio-politiques des statistiques linguistiques officielles ». Cahiers de linguistique. Eme éditions, p.13-31

Humbert, Philippe (2018). « Un siècle de cartographie statistique des langues en Suisse : (dé)faire la frontière linguistique avec des chiffres et des idées ». in Meyer Pitton, L. et L. S. Schedel (éd.) : Frontières linguistiques (en Suisse) : nouvelles approches, perspectives critiques. Édition thématique du Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée, n°108, p.15-34

Duchêne, Alexandre ; Philippe N. Humbert ; Renata Coray (2018). « How to ask questions on language? Ideological struggles in the making of a state survey » in Duchêne, A. et P. Humbert (ed.): Survey-ing speakers and the politics of census, Special issue of The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, n°252, p.45-72

Duchêne, Alexandre ; Philippe N. Humbert (2018) : « Surveying languages : The art of governing speakers with numbers » in Duchêne, A. et P. Humbert (ed.): Survey-ing speakers and the politics of census, Special issue of The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, n°252, p.1-20