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 examines the social conditionality of language, but also with its socio-cultural implications. Sociolinguists research structural (language change, language mixing, borrowing, dialect levelling, 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.

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©PHAISITSAWAN - stock.adobe.com

The following linguists work in the field of language and society/sociolinguistics:

Svitlana Antonyuk (Department of Psychology):

Language policy, language contact, language conversion (Ukrainian, Russian)

Jennifer Brunner (Department of 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)

Oleksandra Damonte-Matveienko (Department of Linguistics):

  • Sprachkonversion (Ukrainisch, Russisch)

Johanna Fanta-Jende (Department of German Studies):

  • Inner & Outer Multilingualism in Austria
  • situational use of varieties
  • Language repertoires and variety spectra

Anouschka Foltz (Department of English Studies):

  • Attitudes towards multilingualism
  • Language and health

Antonia Gösweiner (Centre for Didactics of German as a Second Language & Language Education):

Attitudes of adolescents in Austria towards gender-inclusive language

Agnes Grond (Department of Theoretical and Applied Translation Studies):

  • Multilingualism
  • Sociolinguistics of Kurdish
  • language policy
  • Minority languages

Julia Gspandl (Centre for Plurilingualism):

  • Minderheitensprachen
  • (Socio)linguistic citizenship
  • Migrationslinguistik
  • mehrsprachige taube Migrant*innen
  • Gebärdensprachsoziolinguistik
  • semiotische Repertoires

Katharina Haslacher (Centre for Psychotherapy):

  • Multilingualism
  • First and second language acquisition
  • (Foreign) language identity

Sabine Heinemann (Department of Romance Studies):

  • Minority languages (especially Friulian)
  • Migration linguistics

Martin Hummel (Department of Romance Studies):

  •  research on form of address

Anneliese Kelterer (Department of Linguistics):

  • Conversation analysis
  • Expression of judgements in Austrian spontaneous speech

Lisa Kornder (Department of English Studies):

  • Pronunciation and accent in multilingual speakers and their social evaluation

Karoline Marko (Department of English Studies):

Language in connection with social aspects especially for the field of forensic linguistics

Monika Messner (Department of Romance Studies): 

  • Multilingualism in institutional and gastronomic contexts, Italian-German language contact (with a focus on South Tyrol).

Ineke Mennen (Department of English Studies): 

  • Accent in multilingualism and its social evaluation

Hermine Penz (Department of English Studies):

  • Ethnography
  • Language and ecology/ecolinguistics
  • interactive sociolinguistics, e.g. lingua franca communication

Johann Ulrich Reubold (Department of English Studies):

  • Multilingual and dialectal language production and perception
  • Language and dialect attrition
  • L1-L2 interaction

Elisabeth Scherr (Department of German Studies): 

  • Internal multilingualism: language and identity
  • The role of language in times of crisis

Vesela Simeonova (Department of Slavic Studies):

  • Evidentiality in Heritage Languages
  • dialectal variation of pragmatic phenomena

Marko Simonovic (Department of Slavic Studies):

  • Minority languages (Fiuman, Russian, Romani)
  • Normativity
  • Heritage languages

Jelena Stojkovic (Department of Slavic Studies):

  • Sociophonetics of the South Slavic languages
  • Language games
  • Hypercorrection

Ralf Vollmann (Department of Linguistics):

  • Language Attitude Research
  • Multilingualism
  • World Englishes
  • Hakka as a global minority language