Multilingualism and structural change
Insights from past histories and present realities

This workshop is part of a project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which aims to bring together an international team of researchers with expertise in language contact and change to develop a state-of-the-art understanding of contact-induced language change in multilingual contexts.

The project asks:   1) What is the relationship between multilingualism and contact-induced structural change?

    2) What is the role of language contact in historical processes of language development?

    3) What is the link between contact-induced change and speaker identity?

The goal is to advance our understanding of cross-linguistic manifestations of language contact and contact-induced syntactic change, from a diachronic and synchronic perspective.

Aïcha Belkadi – Multilingualism, code mixing and identity in North Africa 

Victoria Fendel & Robin Meyer – Messing with your Morphosyntax – evidence from Greek–Coptic and Iranian–Armenian contact 

Ludwig Rübekeil – Corpus vs. Reconstruction: Proto-Germanic as a 'Trümmersprache' 

Charlotte Hemmings – Contact-induced change in Enggano (an Austronesian language of Indonesia)

Claudia Bucheli Berger – Alemannic syntactic features in South Bavarian dialects? 

Marwan Kilani – Egyptian and its Auxiliary Verb Constructions: Exploring a typological “chimera” 

Anita Auer – Tracing dialect and language contact in Late Medieval and Early Modern England 

Lutz Marten, Hannah Gibson & Teresa Poeta – Inheritance, innovation, and contact: Centre-periphery effects in Bantu  

Paul Widmer – Migration events and language change: PoS usage of bilingual heritage speakers of Albanian

Daniel Elmiger – Nonsexist/inclusive language: morphological possibilities and constraints in the Swiss national languages