Tigre Studies in the 21st Century

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Rainer Voigt
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 270800584

This publication concerns the Tigre people and their language which bears the same name. Tigre is the third-largest Ethio-Semitic language (after Amharic and Tigrinya), and the fifth-largest within the Semitic language family with Arabic and Modern Hebrew included. It is spoken over a wide area in the Northern, Western and Eastern lowlands of Eritrea as well as in the adjacent parts of Sudan. As far as continously offering teaching courses is concerned and the ongoing long term research that springs from it into the culture and language of the Tigre, the Department for Semitic and Arabic Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin has no equal anywhere in the world. It seemed therefore appropriate to promote future research into the language and culture of the Tigre people by using an international conference to bring together leading scholars from that crisis region with European scholars.The fact that in the last decade Tigre has developed into a fully-fledged language has so far not been appreciated by scholars of Semitic studies nor by the more regionally oriented scholars in cultural and social studies and the humanities. With Tigre¿s astonishing development in mind we decided to give our volume of the conference proceedings a two-part structure: one part reserved for the evolving developing fundamental research into Tigre language and linguistics and the second part, building on this, for dealing with the contributions of a historical and cultural orientation to achieve a deeper understanding of the largely unknown social structures existing in the crisis region - the Horn of Africa. In the light of all this it is of great importance that the general public here as well as in Eritrea/Sudan/Egypt take note of the impulses for new research flowing therefrom.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants