Bamberg Survey of Language Variation and Change (BSLVC)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Manfred Krug; Professorin Dr. Anne Leucht; Professor Dr. Timo Schmid
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Statistics and Econometrics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548274092

This project investigates the use of lexical and grammatical structures in varieties of English around the world. Interdisciplinary in nature, its overarching goals are (i) to identify (supra-)regional patterns and globalization trends through the systematic description, profiling and comparison of regional and variety-type variation and (ii) to develop novel statistical methods for the analysis of hierarchically structured ordinal data. For this purpose, more than 5,000 questionnaires have (so far) been collected in 12 countries where English is used as a native language (ENL), a second language (ESL) or as a foreign language (EFL). The survey elicits sociodemographic data, informant ratings for lexical preferences and stylistically differentiated usage ratings for a broad range of grammatical structures, including 62 features from the electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE; Kortmann et al. 2020). By drawing on this database, we will (i) develop new statistical methods for the analysis of ordinal response variables in high-dimensional linguistic surveys, (ii) describe the use of grammatical features in selected varieties of English and compare varieties from a typological perspective, and (iii) create an interactive platform for the analysis of the database and facilitate the adoption of statistical methods by providing didacticized resources. After project completion, the database will be made available to the scientific community.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants