Linguistic Diversity
Since its foundation in 2005, the Faculty of Humanities has enjoyed an enduring association with multilingualism and affine empirical linguistics and language corpora archiving (Hamburg Center for Language Corpora, HZSK) thanks to the outstanding performance of the SFB 538 “Multilingualism” and its groundbreaking transfer activities. Following the conclusion of Linguistic Diversity Management in Urban Areas (LiMA), jointly managed by the Faculty of Humanities and the former Faculty of Education, Psychology and Human Movement from 2009 to 2013 as part of the State Excellence Initiative, the Faculty has refined its successful cross-departmental research in the faculty focus area Linguistic Diversity.
Since 2014 this faculty focus area has bundled activities that deal with the broader field of linguistic diversity in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary way. It examines linguistic variation due to historical and contemporary, social and cultural, or ethnic and cognitive factors, differences in linguistic communication brought about through different media, as well as individual and societal multilingualism resulting from migration and linguistic contact and its transformation into institutional structural conditions. The Center for Linguistics (ZfS) offers a range of integrated measures, including cross-departmental lecture series, piloting of innovative teaching concepts and colloquia, and individual and group research.
Collaboration has fostered diverse networks with academies in long-term projects, with universities here and abroad in alliances and individual projects, and within Universität Hamburg through cooperation with other faculties and their various focus areas. Brief details of our current projects are below. These projects focus on questions on the structural form and development of individual and societal multilingualism and linguistic variation in different contexts and constellations in Germany, Europe, and the rest of the world.