Projects

The FZ DiMOS regards its primary task as researching and documenting the German language in Eastern Europe within the context of the region’s historical and current multilingual situation, whilst closely involving the languages neighbouring German in the region, as well as local universities and other academic institutions. The guiding principle here is to view German no longer as a language of domination or a national language, but as an interregional language and a linguistic link in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe – a region characterised by centuries of migration, including contemporary movements. Contact: Prof. Dr Rupert Hochholzer.

The Regensburg Association for Advertising Research (RVW) was established in 2006 as a consortium of academics from various disciplines. The RVW’s central focus is the Historical Radio Advertising Archive (HWA). Its aim is to collaborate on the historical and systematic cataloguing of this archive, as well as on further research into advertising in – in principle – all its forms. Contact: Prof. Dr Sandra Reimann.

In the Italian village of Sappada/Plodn (Friuli-Venezia Giulia), a German-based minority language has been preserved and passed down for centuries. To document this language and support its teaching in educational contexts, a research group is working on a comprehensive bilingual grammar (Italian/German). This covers, amongst other things, aspects of the language’s history, orthography and pronunciation, syntax, morphology, pragmatics, as well as dialectal variation and language contact. Contact: PD Dr Nicole Eller-Wildfeuer.

The NAMEN research group has existed at the University of Regensburg since 1998. It brought together Professors and Research Associates from various faculties to pool their expertise, initiate joint projects and establish onomastics as an interdisciplinary field of research at the University of Regensburg. The naming advisory service of the NAMEN research group was transferred to the Working Group for Onomastics within the GfN on 12 October 2023.

The DONBO project has made the results of onomastic research available to a wide audience on the internet. Through collaboration between onomasticians and technical specialists, a platform has been created that provides both experts – such as linguists, dialectologists and historians – and interested members of the general public with quick and straightforward access to the findings of East Bavarian onomastic research, to begin with. In accordance with traditional methods of onomastics, references to the relevant places in historical sources are, amongst other things, collected, annotated and analysed. The explanation of the linguistic origin and meaning of each place name is based on this data and the current dialectal form.