Graduate Fellowships in Linguistics

Much of the research within the theme group “Language Variation and Language Change” (LVLC) concentrates on language contact in past and present times. Using data from a wide variety of languages, particularly Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Finno-Ugric, members of this group concern themselves with contact-induced change, including dialect contact and Sprachbund phenomena. This results in an impressive list of publications, including such standard works as Einführung in die Dialektologie des Deutschen, and the multi-volume Lexicon of the earliest Germanic loanwords in Balto-Finnic languages.

The linguistic effects of language contact are of particular relevance at present, i.e. at a time when people are increasingly exposed to other languages as a result of rapid globalization and increased migration. These effects can be studied from different perspectives, both synchronically and diachronically.

The LVLC research group welcomes project proposals concerning language contact phenomena, either at present or in the past, in any of the above-mentioned language (sub)families. These proposals are expected to address the question of how language or dialect contact results in variation and change. Possible topics include lexical and/or grammatical changes in the target language or dialect (including contact-induced grammaticalization), language attitudes, the impact of English as the new global lingua franca, or the emergence of new varieties among urban teens.

In order to establish the significance of the LVLC research group as a centre for research on contact-induced change, an international three-day conference entitled Language Contact in Times of Globalization will be held at the University of Groningen on September 28-30, 2006, featuring some 50 contributed papers and three plenaries.