German in Austria (DiÖ). Variation - Contact - Perception

The scope and topic of this SFB encompass the entire spectrum of variation and varieties of German in Austria (in the following DiÖ (Deutsch in Österreich)), bringing together expertise from the fields of variationist linguistics, contact linguistics and multilingualism research, as well as from sociolinguistically based research on language perception and attitudes. There will be two main outcomes of the SFB: Firstly, the SFB will produce comprehensive and detailed analyses of DiÖ including manifold forms of contact between varieties and languages in Austria as a result of the close collaboration between members of the research team, who are specialised in diverse linguistic subdisciplines, i.e. variationist linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, historical linguistics, research on language contact, language acquisition, multilingualism and German as L2, research on language attitudes and perception, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and language technology. The analyses will be disseminated in various formats (monographs, anthologies, journal articles) in internationally renowned and peer-reviewed publication outlets (book series and journals). The second outcome of the SFB will be that the data collected and processed are made available via an online digital research infrastructure on German in Austria, which will also link up with other existing or emergent research platforms. Via the SFB research platform, the SFB data (which are of course handled according to strict ethical standards) will be systematised, processed for the use of search tools and published online. The data will be made accessible to linguists, language learners, language teachers and the general public. The data will include digitised material in the form of questionnaires, sound recordings, transcripts, language maps and ot her formats; and these materials will also be supplemented with relevant metadata, including various annotation and classification levels. The research platform is to be set up and hosted at the digital humanities data hub of the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna, in the context of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) and will remain available beyond the duration of the SFB. This SFB constitutes the first occasion on which seven institutes/departments across Austria (from four universities and the Austrian Academy of Sciences) collaborate on researching and documenting the German language in Austria. In this and the above-listed respects, the SFB has been designed to be highly interdisciplinary. It will transcend the boundaries of individual philologies by including Germanic and Slavic linguists in the research team. Experts from the linguistic disciplines listed above will be working together closely to create and support potential synergies to facilitate the theoretical and methodological convergence of the various fields involved in this innovative and comprehensive joint endeavor.