Emergence and change of registers: The case of Lithuanian and Latvian (B02)

• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416591334

The project will investigate the emergence and development of registers by examining the beginning of written transmission of Lithuanian and Latvian. It will focus during phase 1 of the CRC on the works of two pre-eminent pioneers of the new literary languages, Johannes Bretke for Old Lithuanian and Georg Mancelius for Old Latvian, whose works attest a range of genres where intra-individual variation can be observed. Crucial here will be the interactions with the languages that provided translation sources and with those spoken in the multi-lingual environment. The following research questions arise: (i) How do registers emerge, and to what extent to individual authors create them? (ii) How can the influence of loan registers be evaluated? (iii) How can the influence of source languages within a multi-lingual setting be identified? (iv) How do established registers change over time?

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1412: Register: Language-Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation
• Applicant Institution: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Project Heads: Privatdozentin Dr. Anna Helene Feulner; Professor Dr. Wolfgang Hock