Current Projects

Para-Romani varieties, which have a Romani vocabulary but use the grammatical frame of another language, typically that of the co-territorial majority language, are documented in historical sources from the seventeenth century onwards. However, the varieties spoken nowadays and labelled as Para-Romani are better defined as registers or styles of the respective majority languages, since the largest part of their Romani lexicon has been lost and they are only used in specific contexts. More recent literature on Romani reports on the existence of a Para-Romani variety in which a Romani lexicon is combined with Hungarian and used by the Romungros in Hungary.

The project, which is carried out in collaboration with Márton A. Baló from the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics and Mátyás Rosenberg from the Eötvös Loránd University, is the first attempt to collect data from this Hungarian variety. Based on historical data as well as newly collected data from social media and through semi-structured interviews, we look into the variety’s lexical and morphological features, its sociolinguistic functions and the situations in which the special vocabulary is activated. We will also try to discover its formation and emergence, by identifying the sources that may be considered the earliest written documentation of Hungaro-Romani.

Research: Zuzana Bodnárová, Márton A. Baló, Mátyás Rosenberg

Central Europe is linguistically a very interesting region, as all four major language families of Europe come together here: Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric. In the midst of this are the Roma and their heritage language Romani. Romani is prone to language contact as it is overarched by the language(s) spoken by the majority population among whom the Roma live. We are concerned with various aspects of language contact that gave rise to common features found in the languages of the region.

Currently, we are investigating the phenomenon of adding directions to remote places, e.g., going “out to Vienna” but “up to Graz”, which is typical of South German varieties. The same phenomenon is also found in Hungarian and Slovenian, as well as in the Romani dialects of the region. We want to explore why we use this form of place-making in our imagination and how it came to be a feature of our region that spans over structurally different languages.

Research: Daphne Reitinger, Jakob Wiedner

This project investigates literature written in minority languages of Southeastern Europe after 1945, looking at peripheral voices of a polyphonic and multi/plurilingual region. The SEE region, however, is not taken as a whole, but aims to concentrate on the countries of former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo*, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia), with comparison to practices in Romania, and the literary production of minority groups in these countries (e.g. Hungarian literature in Vojvodina; Istro-Romanian poetry in Croatia; German-language fiction in Banat; literature in different Romani dialects or in Yiddish etc.).

^{* This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSC 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence.}

The intention is to give voice and increase the visibility of literary productions that are often not even translated into the majority languages, let alone into the languages of major circulation, thereby remaining largely unknown, unread, and under-analyzed. Comprehensive research into these cultural productions has not been done to date. Synchronically, the aim is to compare and contrast this phenomenon with other European regions, and also to look, diachronically, at the legal frameworks within which these literary productions have operated and existed since 1945. Working with writers, publishers, translators, cultural workers, institutions and communities in SEE is a key component of this project.

Research: Oana Hergenröther

Deaf migrants face many linguistic and social challenges, but they demonstrate a unique communicative potential.

By means of semi-structured interviews, conducted by a deaf Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS) signer, the research project explores the language background and current language use of deaf migrants in Styria.

Research: Julia Gspandl

Video: "Project description in International Sign"

The majority of widely read literary works operate in the sphere of monolingualism – either in the original as the first language of the author or in translations aimed at a monolingual audience. In this project, the focus is on literary texts that break with this ‘monolingual paradigm’. The focus is on literary compositions by authors who cross linguistic borders (and in many cases also national ones) and use (one of) their second language(s) as verbal medium for their literary texts.

Translingual by definition, these texts frequently also address language use in literature through manifest multilingual strategies such as code-switching and language mixing, or latent strategies such as language references. English, the world’s most widely spoken second language, will serve as a departure to investigate such multilingual strategies from a literary studies perspective, involving linguistics and sociolinguistics when required. The aim of the project is to analyze the effects of the use of second languages in literature on the levels of discourse and story, and to situate them in the field of multilingual literary research.

Research: Lisa Schantl

Paolo Sorrentino's film and prose works are used to examine various communication strategies and stylistic elements of language that the author uses to characterize protagonists. One focus of this project lies on the analysis of different linguistic forms of irony in Sorrentino's works. Another aspect that will be investigated is the conceptualizations of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ in the real world and in linguistics, which permeate all of the author's films and prose works. The third focal point is the examination of linguistic stylistic devices used to depict characters. Sorrentino uses a variety of linguistically dominated forms of representation to emphasise real and fictional figures that have shaped Italian society since the 1970s.

Public figures from Andreotti to Berlusconi, from Jep Gambardella to Tony Pagoda become tangible through the way they are portrayed. However, the protagonists in Sorrentino's works are not only people, but also monumental art objects and landscapes. They play a key role in the thematization of contrasting and mutually dependent concepts. These include the sacred versus the profane, life and death, comedy and tragedy and reflections on the past, present and future. Sorrentino's oeuvre provides a comprehensive basis for examining the linguistic and stylistic features that characterize the author's artistic style. The aim of the project is to analyse these particularities from a linguistic-literary, socio-cultural and cinematic point of view.

Research: Giulia Tardivo

The project explores the relationship between language and identity in Southern Africa, specifically focusing on the linguistic repertoires and voices in literary texts and films. Plurality and hybridity are seen as inherent aspects of linguistic and cultural practices in the region. They are believed to manifest in various forms within literary and cinematographic texts. The project seeks to explore the interplay between language, identity, mobility, and hybridity, with a focus on local cultural producers and an understanding of the larger sociolinguistic and literary-cultural contexts.

A key aspect is the agency of multilingual creators and performers in constructing identities through language. In terms of methodology, both sociolinguistic and literary-cultural perspectives are taken into account. The fluid and dynamic nature of language practices are highlighted, emphasizing the concept of the linguistic repertoire: the range of linguistic resources used in a work and their purpose in constructing, negotiating, and potentially negating identities.

Research: Angelika Heiling

The shared settlement of Styria by German and Slovenian speakers dates back to the early Middle Ages and led to a long-lasting mutual influence. In the feudal period, language played a minor role in identity formation. Over time, an urban-agricultural dichotomy developed, overlapping with language use. In the 18th and 19th centuries, an ethnolinguistic nationalism emerged, leading to nationalist unrest between "Germans" and "Slovenes" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The World Wars and the contrast between capitalism and communism led to the separation between Austria and Slovenia. Following Slovenia’s independence, there has been a gradual rapprochement.

This situation prompts us to examine the matter more closely, specifically asking, "What do we think of each other now?" and since interpersonal contact is known to rely heavily on language, we primarily ask, "What do we think about our neighbor’s language?" Using a discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak 2009), we aim to illustrate how language ideologies manifest in the understanding of multilingualism and how historical processes are reflected in the metalinguistic discourse. We will speak with people in the Styrian border region, on both the Austrian and Slovenian sides, as well as in Prekmurje, a region historically closely intertwined with Styria.

Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak (2009): “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)”. In: Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Ed. by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. Los Angeles: SAGE, 87–121.

Research: Jakob Wiedner, Chiara Wagner