LANGUAGE AND THE HISTORY OF SETTLEMENT

The research area 'Language and the History of Settlement' comprises the investigation of the linguistic landscape and the languages of Southeast Europe in their diachronic and synchronic dimensions. Research explores the toponymy of Southeast Europe as a reflection of historical settlement and migration processes, the relationships and points of linguistic contact among the Balkan languages in the framework of the Southeast European convergence area, language history (i.e. historical grammar) of the individual languages, as well as the philology of texts, especially of the oldest and older stages of the respective Balkan languages. Balkan linguistics also takes those varieties into account that were brought outside Southeast Europe by migration movements, dealing with them as minority languages (diaspora languages, especially Italo-Albanian). Besides the emphasis on the historical perspective, synchronic linguistic phenomena will also be subject to research (e.g. lexical aspects, standardisation processes, linguistic landscape, etc.).