Language and society / Sociolinguistics
As one of the foundations for the social and cultural identity of speakers and their interaction, linguistic behaviour has direct social relevance. Sociolinguistics deals with the social conditionality of language, but also with its socio-cultural implications. Sociolinguists research structural (language change, language mixing, borrowing, dialect equalisation, etc.) and socio-pragmatic aspects of language use (language attitudes, language and age, gender, ethnicity, power structures, etc.).
An important topic in sociolinguistics is multilingualism. All people, even monolingual speakers, are fundamentally multilingual and draw on a linguistic repertoire that includes different dialects, sociolects and language styles of one or more languages, whereby the individual varieties are used in a way that is appropriate to the context and situation. Multilingualism always results in contact between the different varieties, which is a factor in the change of languages (language change). However, language contact also gives rise to new language styles or varieties within a language.
Svitlana Antonyuk (Institute for German Studies; Institute for Slavic Studies):
Language policy, language contact, language conversion (Ukrainian, Russian)
Jennifer Brunner (Institute for Linguistics):
- Minority Languages in Western Tanzania/Language Contact
- Repertoires
- Multilingualism
- On the status of the languages of the Comoros
- Self-reflection of one's own discipline (Decoloniality in Linguistics)
Johanna Fanta-Jende (Institute for German Studies):
- Inner & Outer Multilingualism in Austria
- situational use of varieties
- Language repertoires and variety spectra
Anouschka Foltz (Institute for English Studies):
- Attitudes towards multilingualism
- Language and health
Antonia Gösweiner (Centre for Didactics of German as a Second Language & Language Education):
Opinions and attitudes of young people in Austria on the topic of "gender-equitable language use"
Agnes Grond (Institute for Theoretical and Applied Translation Studies):
- Multilingualism
- Sociolinguistics of Kurdish
- language policy
- Minority languages
Katharina Haslacher (Institute for English Studies):
- Multilingualism
- First and second language acquisition
- (Foreign) language identity
Sabine Heinemann (Institute for Romance Studies):
- Minority languages (especially Friulian)
- Migration linguistics
Martin Hummel (Institute for Romance Studies), research on form of address
Anneliese Kelterer (Institute for Linguistics):
- Conversation analysis
- Expression of judgements in Austrian spontaneous speech
Karoline Marko (Institute for English Studies):
Language in connection with social aspects especially for the field of forensic linguistics
Hermine Penz (Institute for English Studies):
- Ethnography
- Language and ecology/ecolinguistics
- interactive sociolinguistics, e.g. lingua franca communication
Johann Ulrich Reubold (Institute for English Studies):
- Multilingual and dialectal language production and perception
- Language and dialect attrition
- L1-L2 interaction
Vesela Simeonova (Institute for Slavic Studies):
- Evidentiality in Heritage Languages
- dialectal variation of pragmatic phenomena
Marko Simonovic (Institute for Slavic Studies):
- Minority languages (Fiuman, Russian, Romani)
- Normativity
- Heritage languages
Jelena Stojkovic (Institute for Slavic Studies):
- Sociophonetics of the South Slavic languages
- Language games
- Hypercorrection
Ralf Vollmann (Institute for Linguistics):
- Language Attitude Research
- Multilingualism
- World Englishes
- Hakka as a global minority language