Multilingual law-making and the conceptualization of the Swiss language regime

Although Switzerland has been a textbook example for territorial multilingualism for decades, the constitutional principles of the Swiss language regime were only formulated in 1996. Since then, an ever-growing legal corpus aims at establishing a formalized system of language governance. The triangulation between the liberal principle of the freedom of language, a communitarian approach to linguistic territoriality combined with a republican model of one-nation federalism implies some conceptual and terminological innovations at constitutional and legal level. An accurate analysis of the lexical and syntactical choices shows that a drafting approach based on three parallel versions of the legal acts provides the opportunity of finding intertextual arrangements which hints an interpretation of the law that may settle some differences by hinting a teleological interpretation of the law that may depart from the strict literal meaning of one linguistic version. The analysis lets us conclude that the territoriality principle in the Swiss context is contingent to a patriotic approach to language freedom.