Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

September – October 2015, February 2016

From Social History to Phonological Change – the Linguistic Dynamics of Romance-Germanic Encounters

The project seeks to connect dynamics in phonology, the most subtle structures of language, with the dynamics of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic exchanges in societies where Romance and Germanic languages came into contact. Studying the cases of different dialects of French, Italian, and Portuguese and their history of contact with Dutch or German, the project's aim is to establish a framework that uses sociohistorical background information to account for sound change and present-day variation by the help of an integrated approach of both language-internal developments and influences across the boundaries of linguistic systems.

Philipp Krämer graduated at Freie Universitaet Berlin and the Institut d’Études Politiques in Strasbourg in French linguistics, political science and European law. In 2013, he received his PhD in Romance philology from the University of Potsdam with a thesis about the history of French creolistics in the 19th century. He is now a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics at the department of Dutch philology at Freie Universitaet Berlin and has been an invited guest lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland in spring 2015. His research focuses on language contact and creolisation, multilingualism, and language ideologies.