ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates language practice in an officially bilingual German-French city in Switzerland and describes differences in the ordinariness of communicative practices. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of normalization, I show how these different degrees of ordinariness are societally produced through a process I call ordinarization. I argue that ordinariness should not be understood as a natural trait of certain activity types, but as a product of social processes that shape perceptions of these activity types in terms of ordinariness. I then introduce Biel/Bienne, the city where the processes of linguistic ordinarization were studied. I show that in Biel/Bienne different languages are used in differing ways and for different purposes, and that language practices differ in regard to the degree of ordinariness ascribed to them. Based on data from ethnographic and discourse analytic work, I show that differences in ordinariness are socially produced by language policies and language ideologies expressed in the media.
