Editorial

Abstract

As spring 2024 gets underway in many Swiss cities, urban and Sunday dilly-dalliers may well have been taken by surprise by the sight of wild plants and multicolored flowers in once neatly manicured green areas. For some years now, close-cropped lawns and carefully thought-out flower beds have been giving way to wilder, more natural spaces: flower patches in the city. These colorful expanses of meadow flowers are gaining ground in our urban environments, and with them many benefits for biodiversity. This issue of Babylonia is not, of course, about biodiversity as such (nor does it deal with the subject of linguistic ecology), but the parallels with efforts to take variety and variation into account in the language classroom are obvious. We show a less monogamous, more natural perspective on the languages and dialects present in the language classroom, one in which rigid norms and uniform approaches give way to a growing recognition of linguistic diversity. On the contrary, as several contributions in this issue show, rigorous pedagogical management of linguistic diversity (in repertoires, skills, registers, etc.) is fundamental. At a time when Switzerland has been sanctioned by the European Court of Human Rights for its climate policy, we leave you to judge the initiatives taken in Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain and China to promote linguistic diversity in the language classroom for yourselves. Enjoy this issue!

Keywords

• Variation