Björn Hansen and Marek Nekula win Third-Party Funds Application

Jointly, Professor Dr. Björn Hansen and Professor Dr. Marek Nekula, both from the University of Regensburg, and their Polish colleague Anna Zielińska (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) have successfully secured the financing of a German-Polish research project on language change in bilingual families. Sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Polish National Science Centre (NCN, Narodowe Centrum Nauki) as part of the "Beethoven 2" program, they have been awarded a total funding of €800,000. ("Beethoven 2" is a jointly funded programme of the DFG and the NCN, which supports German-Polish research initiatives.)

For three years, researchers of the Institute of Slavic Studies in Regensburg and Warsaw will investigate contact-induced language change in German-Polish families. Among other things, they are interested to decipher which patterns in grammar or sentence structures are integrated from one language into the other. To do this, they conduct interviews with Polish speakers in Germany and vice versa as well as create a comprehensive speech data collection. Since both Polish in Germany and German in Poland are the subject of the study, the Polish-German cooperation is an integral part of the project "Language across generations: contact induced change in morphosyntax in German-Polish bilingual speech (LangGener)". In addition, surveys and evaluations of interviews with Czech speakers in Germany are planned, which will be incorporated in the overall project.

Björn Hansen is the Chair of Slavic Philology and head of the German-Polish Studies program. Marek Nekula is a Professor of Bohemian and Western Slavic Studies as well as Head of Bohemicum Regensburg-Passau and the German-Czech Studies program. Both are professors of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies.