Chair in Multilingualism

The Chair of Multilingualism conducts research into multilingualism in all its social and structural diversity. The focus is on language contact research, mutual language influence and structural language change, as well as languages of origin and migration-related multilingualism, minority languages, and multilingual regions and societies – including dialects in the sense of internal multilingualism. Foreign language acquisition also forms an important part of the Chair’s remit. A regional focus is on Europe, particularly on Romance and Slavic languages. In terms of content, the Chair combines systemic linguistic perspectives with sociolinguistic issues.

The Chair has an interdisciplinary orientation, is closely linked to the faculty’s individual language studies and general linguistics programmes, and also cooperates with subject didactics as well as other disciplines and institutions. Particular emphasis is placed on empirically grounded methodological expertise – from data collection to statistical analysis. The role also involves supervising the Master’s programme in Multilingualism and Regionality, providing further training in multilingualism counselling, and contributing to the Forum on Multilingualism and Regionality and the Forum on Languages of Origin.