Professorship in Multilingualism

The Professorship in Multilingualism conducts research into multilingualism in all its social and structural diversity. The focus is on language contact research, cross-linguistic influence and structural language change. Other key areas of focus include heritage languages, migration-related multilingualism and minority languages, as well as multilingual regions and societies. This also encompasses dialects in the sense of internal multilingualism. Foreign language acquisition also forms an important part of the department’s profile.

A regional focus is on Europe, particularly on Romance and Slavic languages. Conceptually, the department combines systemic linguistic perspectives with sociolinguistic questions.

The department has an interdisciplinary orientation and is closely linked to the faculty’s single-language and general linguistics programmes. Furthermore, it cooperates with subject-specific didactics as well as other disciplines and institutions. Particular emphasis is placed on empirically grounded methodological competence – from data collection to statistical analysis.

The profile also includes supervising the Master’s programme in Multilingualism and Regionality and the supplementary training programme in Multilingualism Counselling. In addition, there is active involvement in the Forum on Multilingualism and Regionality and the Heritage-Language Forum.