Projects
Current projects
Research Unit "Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations" (RUEG)
The Research Unit "Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations" (RUEG) is a cluster of projects that collaboratively investigate the linguistic systems and resources of bilingual speakers from families with migration history, "heritage speakers", in their two languages (heritage and majority language) across formal and informal, written and spoken communicative situations. We target different groups of heritage speakers in Germany and the USA, and monolingually raised speakers of the respective majority and heritage languages. An important collaborative output of the group is the multimodal, multi-level RUEG corpus, which provides the central empirical basis for analyses of linguistic patterns in speakers' repertoires. In addition to studies on grammar, pragmatics, and the lexicon, we investigate computational linguistic methods and provide materials and impulses for the educational domain.
Web portal Kiezdeutsch
Kiezdeutsch is a new urban dialect of german. Like other urban dialects (e.g., Berlinish), Kiezdeutsch is characterised by the great linguistic diversity that is typical of cities. Kiezdeutsch has emerged in neighbourhoods where different dialects, linguistic styles, and languages come together, and this diverse linguistic context has made Kiezdeutsch a particularly innovative dialect of German. This information portal on Kiezdeutsch is a project of the Chair of German in Multilingual Contexts (Prof. Dr. Heike Wiese) at the Humboldt University of Berlin, which was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
The impact of language ideologies on register distinctions in multilingual contexts (SFB 1412, C07, phase II)
Building on the findings from the first phase, the project seeks to advance models of register knowledge by investigating the role of language-ideologies in different societal contexts. The research focuses on the dynamic interplay between the societal macro context (What monolingual and multilingual ideologies on registers are evident at the macro level of society?), the meso level of speech communities (How do macro-level differences affect multilingual speech communities?) and the micro level of linguistic practices (How do register distinctions pan out in language use?). The project employs discourse-analytic, corpus-linguistic and experimental methods to explore the relationship between language ideologies and register distinctions in Germany, Namibia, Australia and Singapore.
Cooperation with Yale University
The project supports the cooperation of our group with that of Maria M. Piñango, Chair of Psycho- and Neurolinguistics, Yale University, USA. We conduct cooperative studies on the interface of grammar and the conceptual system, contribute to conferences and co-author papers, and organise an exchange of advanced students through lab internships.
Completed projects
Register perception in a multilingual context of German (SFB 1412, C07, phase I)
The research project investigated how formal and informal registers are perceived in the multilingual context of German spoken in Namibia. Through corpus-linguistic and experimental methods we investigated register differentiation (e.g., What new registers of German emerge in multilingual settings?), awareness (e.g., What features do language users pick up in their perception of register distinctions?), and attitudes towards different registers (e.g., What role do different types of features play for sociolinguistic evaluations and associations?).
German in Namibia (Namdeutsch)
The German-Namibian research project studied German in present day Namibia. A detailed project website is available in German.
Limits of variability: Integration of linguistic ressources in highly diverse urban settings (SFB 1287, A01)
The project investigated the multilingual context of an urban street market, where speakers regularly access a wide range of linguistic resources. While previous research on such contexts focused on the characteristic diversity and fluidity, our investigation will emphasised stability and is guided by the hypothesis that the observable and sometimes chaotic variability does not establish randomness, but is constrained by systematic patterns and restrictions. To capture this variability as well as its constraints, we combined ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods with grammatical analysis and theoretical linguistic modeling.
DAAD Guest Chair “The Multilingual Lexicon”
The guest chair "The Mulilingual Lexicon" was organised in cooperation with the Potsdam Centers "Language, Variation and Migration" (Heike Wiese) and "Research Institute for Multilingualism" (Harald Clahsen). It served as a focal point for three Master's courses (International Master's / Doctoral Program Experimental and Clinical Linguistics; Linguistics: Communication - Variation - Multilingualism; Foreign Language Linguistics) and strengthened the linguistic focus on multilingualism across faculties, which gained a strong profile through the chair.
Creative German in multilingual urban areas: Youth language in Berlin and Windhoek
The project supported a German-Namibian cooperation to investigate the development of German in multilingual contexts, with a focus on Berlin and Windhoek as two urban centres in Germany and Namibia with multilingual German-speaking communities. A shared focus was the linguistically creative group of adolescent speakers.
Kiezdeutsch
Project B6 within the Collaborative Research Area 632 ‘Information Structure’ of University of Potsdam and Humboldt University Berlin. In this project, we investigated Kiezdeutsch, an urban contact dialect that emerged in multilingual and multiethnic neighbourhoods of Germany. We developed a corpus of naturally occurring speech based on self-recordings of adolescents, available as audio files with transcriptions in EXMARaLDA, and several annotation layers.
Educational Modules on Language Variation: Dialects, Multilingualism, and the Question of "Correct German"
The project transfers research results from the domain of “Language variation in urban areas” into the educational domain. We developed multimedia materials for new supplementary modules for initial and continuing education programmes of social actors who play key roles in the education of children and adolescents and are important in shaping public opinion on language and language competences, namely teachers in primary schools, secondary schools and in the early education of public day-care facilities for young children.
“Let’s Do Language” - ‘hood Goes Uni
Kreuzberg pupils investigated language variation and multilingualism: Together with linguists from Potsdam University’s German Department, pupils from three schools in Berlin-Kreuzberg conducted their own research projects on linguistic topics they identified themselves, e.g., the myth of “double semilingualism” of young people with a migrant background, youth language in general, “Kiezdeutsch” (youth language in multiethnic urban neighbourhoods in Germany) in particular, and code switching or switching between linguistic varieties within one’s linguistic repertoire.
The Regulation of Emotions by Linguistic Rituals; Project as part of the Excellency Cluster ‘Languages of Emotion’ of Free University Berlin
The project investigated in how far emotions can be regulated by linguistic rituals. We started from the hypothesis that ritual (linguistic and non-linguistic) contexts, due to their high degree of structural parallelisation, can serve to synchronise emotions in social groups and trigger a positive feeling of control.
Linguistic Realities of Young People in Multiethnic Urban Europe
The project established a network for working groups with a focus on linguistic practices of young people in multiethnic urban neighbourhoods, the attitudes towards these practices and the views that are evident in public discourse. It brought together the areas of language structure, language use, and language ideologies.
Language-specific effects on conceptualisation in the domain of lexicalised compounds
The project investigated language-dependent differences in the conceptualisation of referents of such exocentric-metaphorical compounds as English ‘hedgehog’ or German ‘Schildkröte’ (literally ‘shield-toad’). The study was based on an analysis of morphosyntactic and morphosemantic representation in composition, and compared native speakers of German and (US-American) English.
The Architecture of the Mental Lexicon in Language Comprehension
In this project, we conducted a cross-linguistic investigation (German, English, Spanish, Persian) on the representation of lexical elements in language processing, which yielded psycholinguistic evidence on the access to grammatical-semantic features distinct from general-conceptual and syntactic features.
How is the meaning of lexical elements linked to syntactic structures?
The project investigated the interface of syntactic, lexical-semantic, and conceptual structures. Based on a comparison of different models of semantics (in particular Conceptual Semantics and Two-Level Semantics), it developed a definition of this interface in the framework of a tripartite linguistic architecture.