Variationist Linguistics and Sociolinguistics
The common thematic frame of the research area „variationist linguistics and sociolinguistics“ is based on the wide spectrum of variation and varieties of language. Therefore, diverse linguistic situations will be analysed in detail from different linguistic perspectives, such as variationist linguistic, language contact, multilingualism and sociolinguistic research. The research area covers – for instance – investigations about standard language variation in written contexts (cf. www.variantengrammatik.net/index.html), variation in spoken language (cf. jugendsprachen.uni-graz.at/en/) and language usage in urban areas that are characterised as spaces of linguistic merging and simultaneously of linguistic diversity due to national and international migration (cf. stadtsprachen.uni-graz.at/en/). From a methodological point of view, the projects of the research area follow strong empirical criteria as well as a corpus based approach and focus on the description of different linguistic situations using authentic language data. Therefore, the main target is to gain a more holistic insight into the dynamics of language and linguistic based processes of communication. Concrete research topics are:
- Internal and external multilingualism
- Language contact and linguistic change
- Variation and linguistic change
- Mutual influences between written and spoken language
- Normativist attitudes of speaking/writing communities
- Factors of linguistic change
- Urban-rural opposition and diatopic variance
- Language perception and attitudes of speaking/writing communities
- Linguistic construction of social identity and otherness
Coordinators
Dejan Matic, Arne Ziegler
