Forschung

The project examines a variety of ways in which minority languages are employed in local place branding and tourism promotion. The research will be focused on comparing how language resources are employed for the purposes of tourism in Zadar (Croatia) and in the Austrian provinces of Burgenland, Carinthia and Styria. While members of several officially recognized national minorities live in Zadar, the city is the home to two nowadays severely endangered, but officially unrecognized, minority language communities – the Arbanasi and the Zaratino speakers. In the Austrian regions the situation is different in that the Croatian and Slovenian minorities in Austria are institutionally recognized, and their members have started including their heritage culture in the tourist offer of particular places. The project research will thus consider and contrast, on the one hand, the place of minority languages often perceived as central aspects of minority cultures in one tourism-oriented urban centre in Croatia with their place in less urbanized regions in Austria. This will be done by applying an ethnographic methodological approach combined with multimodal discourse analysis in order to grasp multiple ways in which local communities and tourist centers rely on language commodification in place branding and tourism promotion.

Weitere Informationen

The Ukraine is a multilingual state, with a predominantly bilingual constellation: Ukrainian and Russian. Ukrainian is strong in the West, and Russian dominates in the East and in the South of the Ukraine. The Central Ukraine holds an intermediate position. Ukrainian and Russian, two structurally closely related languages, function as donor languages for a mixed code called Surzhyk. The specific point with the Ukrainian-Russian mixed code is that it may exist in two variants, reflecting the history of the country.“Prototype Surzhyk” stems from the times of Russian political and social dominance in the Ukraine: From the 1860-ies in Tsarist times and from the 1930-ies in Soviet times people adapted themselves to a Russian-speaking environment. This “old” Surzhyk has developed in a way resembling so called ‘dialect levelling’ on the basis of Ukrainian. Though still quite variable, a certain stabilisation of this mixed code is observed, since adults started to speak Old Surzhyk between themselves and with their children in informal communication over several generations. The second variant of mixed code, here called “Neo-Surzhyk”, is of younger origin. It evolved with people who used to practise mainly Russian, but - due to the Ukrainian language politics after 1990 - had at least partially to turn to Ukrainian. Neo-Surzhyk thus has a Russian base and is expected to occur – most probably along with Old Surzhyk - in the South of the Ukraine (and in the East, now inaccessible for systematic research).The central research question of our project with an innovative contact-linguistic dimension is the following: Is there a clear differentiation between two mixed codes based on the same two closely related donor languages? Or is there a gradual transition between groups of speakers with different sociodemographic backgrounds?The research hypotheses of our project are:Grammatically, Old Surzhyk and Neo-Surzhyk can be differentiated mainly on quantitative grounds with cluster differences between speakers (for example as to the spread of inflectional endings).Lexically, there are clear differences: prevailing Ukrainian vs. prevailing Russian lexemes.As to sound patterns, Old Surzhyk and Neo-Surzhyk are different structurally.Neo-Surzhyk is more variable than Old Surzhyk.The alternative to these hypotheses is that there are no two distinct Surzhyks but rather a continuum between a strongly Ukrainian-like and a strongly Russian-like Surzhyk, in combination with sociodemographic differentiations on multiple levels.The methodological approach of the project consists in an innovative corpus linguistic description, combined with analytical methods of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics, correlated with sociodemographic data. In addition to that, in-depth interviews on individual “Sprachbiographien” (linguistic biographies) will be conducted and analysed qualitatively, in order to correlate quantitative findings with qualitative data.

Weitere Informationen