Standardization in Diversity: The case of German in Luxembourg (1795-1920)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Evelyn Ziegler
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230256794

At the intersection of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, this project focuses on the dynamics of the standardization of the German language in Luxembourg. With a long history of multilingualism, Luxembourg constitutes a prime example for studying language standardization in a context of linguistic diversity. Standardization, roughly understood as the selection, codification, implementation and elaboration of language norms, has been mostly investigated in a monolingual or comparative perspective, but hardly at all from the point of view of language contact and multilingualism. Although there is no doubt that language contact and multilingualism figure prominently for language history in general, their specific impact on language standardization has scarcely been studied. To fill this gap, the proposed project is devoted to the role of language contact between Germanic varieties, i.e. Moselle-Franconian/emerging Luxembourgish, colloquial German, and language contact between German and French, in the standardization of the German language in Luxembourg. Grounded in up-to-date theory on language standardization, language contact, multilingualism and text linguistics, the project will be empirically based on an online database providing an extensive corpus of historical bilingual public notices of the city of Luxembourg.Particularly focused on the so called long 19th century from the French Revolution to the Great War, the contact scenario to be investigated is framed by processes of political annexation, national emancipation and societal modernization, e.g. development of administration structures and emergence of urban spaces as an arena for public communication. Set in this context, a language management approach to language standardization will be adopted and the effects of and interplay between linguistic and social factors will be studied.The domain of administration provides an excellent setting for these research purposes, as it represents a socially significant type of language use. Within this domain, the investigation will focus on municipal top-down communication, i.e. public notices. Paying equal attention to systemic and functional aspects, the reconstruction of the process of the standardization of German will address structural processes concerning language variation and replication and discuss relevant language management activities, e.g. regulations, decrees, laws. This will also incorporate analysis of data relating to municipal comments on the public notices and language attitudes expressed in sources such as newspapers. In doing so, the project will provide a detailed picture of the processes of status- and corpus standardization and functional elaboration. In an overall perspective, the interaction of language and society will be discussed and a standardization theory will be generated that takes account of the factor of linguistic diversity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Luxembourg
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Peter Gilles