The Phonogram Archives of the University of Zurich
About the Phonogram Archives
The Phonogram Archives (ISIL CH-001390-6) is the oldest audio archive in Switzerland, with a history spanning more than 100 years. The Phonogram Archives were founded in 1909 as an independent organisational unit affiliated with the University of Zurich. With the university reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the Phonogram Archives became an institute of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and, since 1 January 2018, part of the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich.
Our objectives include the collection, documentation, study and publication of dialectological sound recordings of all four Swiss national languages. This includes varieties of all major language areas in Switzerland, such as Swiss German dialects, franco-provençal Patois, the Lombard dialects of Ticino and parts of the Canton of Grisons and also the Rhaeto-Romance idioms.
Holdings
The Phonogram Archive has its own recordings dating back to 1909, and the collection has now grown to around 5,000 audio recordings. Approximately 3,000 of these are recordings of Swiss dialects made by the Phonogram Archive itself. The remaining recordings come from the field of linguistics – mainly dialectology – and from commercial audio recordings.
Due to the many technical revolutions in the history of sound recording technology, we possess a broad collection of various sound media and corresponding playback devices.
Get an overview of the Phonogram Archive's collection and the various types of sound recordings that have been added over time.
The Phonogram Archive also possess a text archive, which is currently being digitised.
Audio Samples
You are welcome to listen to a few audio samples to get an idea of our recordings. To do so, click on the map to display recordings from the corresponding region in a new browser window.
Each square on the map represents the geographical centre of the political municipality of a recording, not the actual location where it was recorded.
You can listen to the first 30 seconds of a recording created by the Phonogram Archive for each of the locations listed.
Legend
green = Alemannic dialects
red = Franco-provençal dialects
turquoise = French dialects
blue = Lombard dialects
yellow = Rhaeto-Romance dialects
purple = Other