The Making of a Mother Tongue: Standardizing European Minor Languages - The Case of Occitan, Yiddish, and Belarusian

• Applicant: Dr. Martina Niedhammer
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432697506

The project aims at analysing the process of standardization of three "minor" European languages (Occitan, Yiddish, and Belarusian) in an interdisciplinary way that combines both historiographic methods and linguistic sources (dictionaries, terminologies etc.). It is taking a fresh look at nation and region building processes in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. On the one hand, the project focuses on the constructivist character of language, which is rarely noticed, by asking about the language planning strategies that language activists chose to promote "their" language in society. With the help of binding norms for spelling and grammar as well as specific vocabulary enrichment, they attempted to create a uniform language standard (corpus planning). At the same time, they tried to enforce this standard among speakers who knew only little about their mother tongue and hardly ever used it for the purpose of writing (status planning). On the other hand, the project wants to counteract a common tendency of nationalism and regionalism studies: to focus either on Western or Eastern Europe. Therefore, it is undertaking a "determination of difference" (Ulrike von Hirschhausen / Jörn Leonhard), i. e. a systematic comparative study of "minor" languages in "West" and "East" on the basis of selected parameters. According to the thesis, this can reveal surprising similarities between "Western" and "Eastern" processes of collective linguistic identity formation and thus make the diversity of national and regional language movements visible as a pan-European phenomenon.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants