Workshops

Workshop A03 – Language mixing in Slavic and beyond

The concept(s) of language mixing and disciplines of research related to that have developed under fierce societal and scientific controversy. While the fundamental issue of the very existence of mixed languages seems to be largely settled, at least in scientific circles, other challenges are still pending proper treatment. These matters concern, among other things, the sociolinguistic embeddings of and attitudes towards hybrid lects, measurements of hybridity, automatic recognition of mixed speech and/or text etc. At present, linguists have an unprecedented multitude of methods and tools at their disposal to tackle old and new issues: Recent developments in corpus linguistics and natural language processing allow do scrutinize language data on a large scale. Simultaneously, traditional approaches and tools like fieldwork and questionnaires still play a crucial role in the elicitation of diverse kinds of data. Finally, psycho-linguistic experimentation has become established as a common methodology in disciplines as diverse as language acquisition, grammar research, and language comprehension. Virtual reality provides new possibilities in this area, too.

The workshop on Language mixing in Slavic and beyond aims at addressing these and related topics within the overarching framework of the Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register”. While our special focus will lie on hybrid lects as a result of contact between closely-related languages (i.e. Ukrainian & Russian, Czech & Polish) and their possible utilization as a kind or register, it will not be restricted to this particular perspective and gratefully benefit from an open and integrative approach to language mixing and language contact.