When dealing with language and variety contact, especially regarding internal and external multilingualism (cf. Wandruszka 1979), Austria – a state located in the heart of Europe and linguistically determined by its dialects... [ view full abstract ]
When dealing with language and variety contact, especially regarding internal and external multilingualism (cf. Wandruszka 1979), Austria – a state located in the heart of Europe and linguistically determined by its dialects and the languages of its neighbouring countries – can be viewed as an ideal ‘laboratory place’ not only for the German speaking world, but for international sociolinguistic research contexts in general. In recent years, different third party funded research projects have focused on this language situation from various linguistic perspectives (e.g. German Dictionary of Regional Language Variants, Youth languages(s) in Austria). The largest project is the special research programme “German in Austria” which has been established to investigate the entire spectrum of variation and varieties, document the findings in an extensive corpus and analyse them in depth. With its nine subprojects it assembles expertise from the fields of variationist and contact linguistics as well as from sociolinguistically based fields of perception/attitude research and interactional discourse analyses.
The colloquium brings together experts that will offer insights into this unique language situation and will focus on the importance and general relevance of language and variety contact for modern sociolinguistics by the example of German in Austria. The talks will address contact phenomena from different perspectives and present first results of the ongoing research as well as findings of the projects mentioned above. Although in the past variationist linguistics and contact linguistics were perceived as different distinctive sociolinguistic subdisciplines, younger investigations have demonstrated the advantages of combining methods and theoretical models of both sub-disciplines (cf. e.g. Kerswill 2010, Britain 2010). Thus, the colloquium takes the stance that the combination of different but complementary methodological and methodical approaches leads to a more holistically painted picture of a contact based language variation within a national speech community.
References
Wandruszka, Mario. 1979. Die Mehrsprachigkeit des Menschen. München: Piper.
Britain, David. 2010. Contact and dialectology. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The handbook of language contact. Malden, Mass et. al.: Wiley-Blackwell. 208-229.
Kerswill, Paul. 2010. Contact and New Varieties. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The handbook of language contact. Malden, Mass et. al.: Wiley-Blackwell. 230-251.
