Tamil Speakers in Switzerland: An Intergenerational and Typological Perspective

Since the mid-1980s, many Tamils left their homeland because of the civil war in Sri Lanka (1983–2009) and for other reasons and settled in different countries. More than 40,000 Tamil migrants have come to Switzerland since then, and Tamil is spoken as a heritage language by second- and third-generation speakers who were born and raised in Switzerland. Within this context, it is the aim of the current study to shed light on the difference between Tamil spoken in the first generation (migrant language) and the second generation (heritage language) in the Swiss German and Swiss French parts of Switzerland. We therefore study Tamil, which is part of the Dravidian language family, in different majority language contexts, i.e., a Germanic language and a Romance language, respectively. While some research on Tamil in a diaspora setting already exists on migrated Tamil communities in Lancaster, California (US), East London (UK) and Toronto (Canada), the focus on Switzerland and contact with German and French has not previously been investigated. The data under investigation, which stems from 20 speakers in total (i.e., 5 first-generation and 5 second-generation speakers from the Swiss German and the Swiss French parts respectively), was collected in 2024 by way of a semi-structured interview based on a sociolinguistic questionnaire and a linguistic test. The data serves as the basis for the intergenerational and typological comparison. The analysis reveals systematic intergenerational differences across several morphosyntactic domains, including agreement, negation pattern, case marking, and subject pro-drop. While first-generation speakers retain greater access to dialect-specific and register-sensitive patterns, second-generation speakers show increased reliance on discourse-pragmatic cues and reduced sensitivity to morphologically encoded distinctions. These findings highlight the role of register, input conditions, and discourse context in shaping heritage Tamil across generations in Switzerland.