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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

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The Equatoguinean community in Switzerland: a sociolinguistic study on language use, contacts, attitudes, and ideologies

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

Context:

Equatorial Guinea is a small country in Central Africa with a population of approximately 2 million. It was a Spanish colony until just under 60 years ago (1968) and is today, except for Western Sahara, the only officially Spanish-speaking country in Africa. Since the first dictatorship in the 1970s, there have been large waves of emigration due to political circumstances. Starting in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, the reasons for emigration became more diverse: politics, studies and continuing education, health, and family reunification. To this day, the primary destination country remains Spain, where there are currently just over 23,000 residents born in Equatorial Guinea (INE, 2022; Schlumpf, 2021, 2022).

In Switzerland, Spanish-speaking communities make up a significant portion of the non-Swiss population. According to data from the Federal Statistical Office, Spain is the country of origin with the largest number of residents (approximately 4% of the population), followed by Colombia and Peru (FSO, 2024). In comparison, the number of people from Equatorial Guinea is extremely small. According to the latest data from the Federal Statistical Office, in 2024 there were 63 people with Equatoguinean citizenship and 165 people born in Equatorial Guinea residing in Switzerland, the majority of whom lived in French-speaking Switzerland. Economic reasons appear to be a key factor in settling in Switzerland: Wages are significantly higher, particularly when compared to Spain, and Geneva in particular offers potential job opportunities in the diplomatic sector (the Equatoguinean Embassy is also located there).


References:

Bundesamt für Statistik (BFS) (2024): «Ständige und nichtständige Wohnbevölkerung nach Kanton, Staatsangehörigkeit, Geburtsstaat, Geschlecht und Zivilstand, 2024», https://www.pxweb.bfs.admin.ch/pxweb/de/px-x-0103010000_424/px-x-0103010000_424/px-x-0103010000_424.px (Access: 24.07.2026).

Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) (2022): «Principales series de población desde 1998», https://www.ine.es/dynt3/inebase/es/index.htm?type=pcaxis&path=/t20/e245/p08/&file=pcaxis&dh=0&capsel=1 (Access: 24.07.2026).

Schlumpf, Sandra (2021): «Spanisch in Afrika/Afrika in Spanien. Sprachliche Charakteristika von Spanischsprecherinnen und Spanischsprechern aus Äquatorialguinea in Madrid», Romanistisches Jahrbuch 72:1, pp. 339-387, https://edoc.unibas.ch/85496/. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/roja-2021-0016.

Schlumpf, Sandra (2022): Voces de una comunidad africana poco visible: los guineoecuatorianos en Madrid. Madrid: Diwan Mayrit.


Research Project:

This research project falls within the field of sociolinguistics and focuses primarily on the following areas of research: Language and Migration, Language Contacts, Language Attitudes, Language Ideologies, and Spanish in Africa. The goal of the project is to obtain a broad overview of the Equatoguinean community in Switzerland: its current distribution within the country (particularly a comparison between French-speaking and German-speaking Switzerland); their migration histories; and their language biographies. Of particular interest are topics such as language contact, linguistic repertoires, language behavior, the functions and values of the languages of Equatorial Guinea and Switzerland (language attitudes and language ideologies), relationships with the country of origin, and transnational migration movements and connections.


Research Methods:

The primary method of data collection is semi-structured guideline interviews (life-story interviews). These are combined with a sociolinguistic questionnaire, a language portrait of the participants, and a narrative task. The research will be conducted with Equatoguineans living in Switzerland (whether they hold Equatoguinean nationality or not; whether they were born in Equatorial Guinea or not) in different parts of the country, divided between French-speaking Switzerland and German-speaking Switzerland.


Connection to Previous Research Projects on Equatorial Guinea:

The project on the Equatoguinean community in Switzerland builds on two previous projects by the same Principal Investigator on Equatorial Guinea:


1.    Habilitation Project S. Schlumpf-Thurnherr (concluded in 2024): Dialect contacts in contexts of migration. The case of the Equatoguinean immigrants in Madrid, Spain (https://universe.unibas.ch/projects-collaborations/7197)

2.    SNSF Project (concluded in 2025): Improving the visibility of Equatorial Guinea as a Spanish-speaking country (https://universe.unibas.ch/projects-collaborations/8215; https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/192228)


The project will thus provide an ideal opportunity to expand our understanding of Equatorial Guinea’s positioning in terms of language policy and its sociolinguistic context. In addition to describing the linguistic situation in the country of origin and in Spain—the most important destination for migrants from Equatorial Guinea—(see previous research projects), Switzerland offers a complementary perspective. Multilingualism in Switzerland brings Equatoguineans into contact with various languages, one of which is also gaining importance in Equatorial Guinea itself as a second official language and is, moreover, a Romance language related to Spanish: French. German, on the other hand, is generally not part of the linguistic repertoire of Equatoguineans. The role of Spanish in Switzerland is also significantly different from that in Equatorial Guinea and Spain, particularly since it has no official status in the country, even though the Spanish-speaking population in Switzerland is very large.

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GraphAfghanica: Building a Federated Knowledge Infrastructure for Afghan Historical Images

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

GraphAfghanica aims to develop a federated digital humanities infrastructure for the study of historical photographs of Afghanistan from the 1970s, a decade marked by profound social and political transformation. Afghan visual heritage from this period is widely dispersed across international institutions, private collections, and local archives, where it remains unevenly described, difficult to access, and rarely studied in a connected manner. Focusing initially on two major collections, the Bibliotheca Afghanica (BA) at the University Library of Basel and the EWA-76 ethnographic collection preserved in the Józef Burszta Digital archive in Poland, the project addresses this fragmentation by interlinking distributed photographic holdings through a provenance-aware

knowledge graph (KG). Rather than centralizing data, GraphAfghanica enables cross-collection exploration while preserving institutional custodianship and data sovereignty. A dedicated web-based application will provide scholars and the public with integrated access to images, metadata, and relationships across repositories, supporting chronological, spatial, and thematic inquiry into Afghanistan’s visual history.


Methodologically, the project integrates knowledge representation with interpretable computer vision and controlled multilingual description generation within a transparent, provenance-rich framework. Photographs will be enriched through image classification, similarity detection, and GraphRAG-based description generation, with all computational outputs explicitly documented, confidence-scored, and open to scholarly scrutiny. By embedding these methods directly into the KG, GraphAfghanica enables historically meaningful analyses of visual patterns, such as transformations of urban environments and changes in women’s visibility in public space. All software components, ontologies, and workflows will be released as open-source resources, ensuring transferability beyond the Afghan case study. GraphAfghanica thus delivers both a sustainable research infrastructure and a reusable methodological framework for the responsible application of AI-assisted approaches to historical visual archives, advancing digital humanities scholarship while supporting ethical engagement with culturally sensitive heritage.

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Curated Escapes and Derelict Landscapes in Times of Climate Change

Research Project  | 5 Project Members

Curated Escapes and Derelict Landscape in Times of Climate Change


From private islands in the Pacific to luxury bunkers in the Alps to eco-estates bordering national parks in southern Africa, land is being transformed into ‘curated escapes’ for the wealthy to flee the social and ecological effects of climate change. Simultaneously, ordinarily people face disastrous effects of climate change, having to re-imagine their own escapes from (or even to) such landscapes deemed ‘derelict’ and incapable of sustaining life and livelihoods. Declarations of dereliction can be as powerful as truly degraded lands, leading to forced displacement and dispossession.


This project investigates how—amidst socio-economic inequalities—climate change is transforming land tenure and the relationship of ordinary people and elites to the land. By considering diverse case studies (Namibia, South Africa, Switzerland, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, the Chagos Archipelago, Tuvalu, and Antarctica), this project looks at how rhetorics and realities of land degradation and human displacement often go hand-in-hand with elite capture of sometimes the very same lands. The CEDEL team looks into these questions from the past to the present, showing that these contemporary challenges are rooted in historical processes.


The CEDEL team looks into (1) historically-developed ‘escapes’, such as private nature conservation and eco-estates in southern Africa. These dynamics of escape and dereliction have been ongoing for decades and relate to current debates of land tenure and equity. We also examine (2) contemporary dilemmas of dereliction and escape, often related to debates around ‘sinking’ islands and melting permafrost and how to make use of lands (and waters) which are facing imminent ecological changes. From the coasts of Sierra Leone and the Indian Ocean to the Swiss Alps, these questions are pertinent for local populations and global debates concerning (un)inhabitability. Finally, the team considers (3) future visions of escape, rooted in eco-fiction (cli-fi) but with real-world proponents. From proposals to build digital clones of the nation of Tuvalu to escapes into outer space, the CEDEL team examines how communities engage in future-making from the past to the present.

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Transcoding the Earth Systems: Climate and Weather Models in Digital Games

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

The project explores how contemporary computer games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) aspire to create a “digital twin” of Earth by integrating geospatial imagery, real‑time meteorological data, machine vision, and cloud‑based computational pipelines. Rather than focusing on the representational claims to realism of these simulated worlds, the project examines their underlying image‑making logistics: the design protocols and imaging infrastructures that contribute to producing a navigable and plausible version of the planet. Combining design‑documentation analysis, media‑ethnographic approaches, and the collection of gameplay imagery, the project considers how these global models operate as technical images. It further explores the hypothesis that the rising prominence of climate and nature in games may be less an expression of environmental awareness or a drive toward photorealism than a repurposing of the cultural techniques that first made climate intelligible as a planetary, technically mediated image. The project is funded by the NOMIS Foundation.