Projects • Dahlem Center for Linguistics

Dahlem Center for Linguistics

Research projects at the DCL

Here you can find information on ongoing and recently completed research projects at the DCL. This overview is based on contributions from DCL members and is regularly updated. It covers projects of various kinds, including doctoral and postdoctoral projects, externally funded projects, and other research activities.

List of projects (A-Z)

The list is sorted alphabetically by title and is not exhaustive.

(In)visibility of Multilingualism in Amdo Tibet

Institut für Romanische Philologie

Dr. Giulia Cabras

This study examines how urban growth, policies, migration, and socioeconomics shape language use in public spaces, focusing on multilingual signage. Combining ethnography, sociolinguistics, and urban studies, it analyzes visibility of Tibetan and Standard Chinese in Rongwo (Longwu), a rapidly ...

Adverbial clauses and their dependency relationships

Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie

Dr. Andreas Pankau

This network project investigates adverbial clauses and their dependency relations from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives, aiming to deepen understanding of subordinate clauses. Meetings explore dependencies between adverbials and matrix clauses, the development, variation, and ...

Experimental Replication of Historical Reanalysis Processes (EXREAN)

Institut für Romanische Philologie

Prof. Dr. Malte Rosemeyer

EXREAN is a pioneering project that replicates historical reanalysis processes in a lab setting to understand how and why grammatical change occurs.

Historische Fremdsprachenlehrwerke digital (FSL digital)

Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie

Prof. Dr. Horst Simon, Prof. Dr. Natalia Filatkina (Universität Hamburg) Prof. Dr. Andrea Rapp (Technische Universität Darmstadt)

Das Langzeitvorhaben widmet sich der Volltexterschließung, korpuslinguistischen Aufbereitung, Annotation, digitalen Vernetzung sowie der sprach-, kultur- und wissenshistorischen Auswertung historischer Fremdsprachenlehrwerke der Frühen Neuzeit, in denen Deutsch Ziel- oder Ausgangssprache ist.

Naming the landscape in the Modern South Arabian languages

Institut für Semitistik

Dr. Fabio Gasparini

The cultures and environment of Modern South Arabian Language (MSAL) speakers are threatened by rapid social changes like urbanisation and Arabization, unsustainable development, and climate change. This leads to a loss of traditional knowledge about human–landscape relationships, negatively ...

ProPer geminates in ITA-L2

Institut für Romanische Philologie

Dr. Andrea Pešková

By means of perception and production data, the project contributes to the research on second language acquisition by exploring how Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish adult (literate) learners acquire (word-internal) consonant length in L2 Italian.

Sprachen im Fluss

Institut für Romanische Philologie

Prof. Dr. Uli Reich, André Amorim

Das Projekt untersucht Modalität und Informationsstruktur in der Tupi-Guarani-Sprache Nheengatu in typologischer Perspektive. Die partizipativ angelegte Methodologie versucht einen Beitrag zur Stärkung der indigenen Autonomie in der Region zu leisten.

The Birth of Monolingualism from Multilingualism

Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie

Prof. Dr. Matthias Hüning , Prof. Dr. Anne Fleig

This comparative project investigates the origins of modern monolingualism—“pre‑monolingualism”—and its literary effects by comparing 18th‑century German and 20th‑century Turkish. It examines how standard‑language ideology, national linguistic norms, and reforms (notably ...

The Discursive Construction of Eating as Entertainment – Carnivalesque Consumption in the Digital Sphere

Institut für Englische Philologie

Prof. Dr. Sofia Rüdiger

This project analyzes how popular Anglophone food-excess videos use language to frame overconsumption as entertainment.

Der alte Dorfteil von Ktivi (Kantiwā) in Zentral-Nuristan

The Linguistic (Pre-)History of the Indo-Iranian Frontier

Institut für Iranistik

Dr. Jakob Halfmann

This junior research group focuses on the languages of the so-called “Indo-Iranian Frontier” in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. The aim of the project is to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the linguistic history and prehistory of the region through a close integration of field ...

Map of Jewish dialects in Mesopotamia color-coded by dialect families

Unrevealing the Mesopotamian Jewish Arabic Dialect Continuum

Institut für Semitistik

Dr. Assaf Bar-Moshe

In the past millennium, Jews residing in the river basins of the Tigris and the Euphrates conversed in a diverse array of Judeo-Arabic dialects. Classified within the qǝltu group of Mesopotamian Arabic, these dialects exhibit notable distinctions among them. Through a comparative analysis, the ...

Variantenpragmatik des Deutschen – Kommunikative Muster im Vergleich (VariPrag), Teilprojekte P1 und P2

Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie

Prof. Dr. Horst Simon, Prof. Dr. Tanja Ackermann (Universität Bielefeld)

VariPrag untersucht regionale Unterschiede im Gebrauch kommunikativer Muster innerhalb des deutschsprachigen Raums. Dass es solche Unterschiede gibt, ist eine weit verbreitete Annahme. Vermutet wird auch, dass Unterschiede im Kommunikationsverhalten immer wieder zu Missverständnissen und ...