Language, Space and Borders
Friday, 14. October 2016 | 11:45 Uhr
Speaker
Organisation
Reporting
In his presentation, Professor Peter Auer of the University Freiburg, pursued the question of the importance of political borders for language.
Contrary to expectations, the convergence of political and linguistic boundaries increased in the 20th century and has not diminished in the 21st century. There are two main reasons for this: “First, the standard languages have spread at the expense of the dialects. Second, national borders adapted to language borders.”
Peter Auer illustrated the development towards a standard language using the example of the border area along the Rhine between Alsace and Baden-Württemberg.
Watch the video to hear Peter Auer’s exact comments on the development of a standard language and to find out what he says about the ‘special case of Switzerland’.
Peter Auer
He received his academic training at the Universities of Cologne, Manchester, and Constance, where he also worked as an assistant professor of General Linguistics. From 1992 to 1998, he was Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Hamburg.
Since 1998, Prof. Peter Auer has held a chair for German Linguistics at the University of Freiburg (Germany) where he was also one of the directors of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS).
He has done extensive research on bilingualism, on phonology and dialectology, on prosody, on interaction, and on spoken language from a syntactic perspective and directed numerous externally funded research projects on these topics.
His book publications include Bilingual Conversation (1984), Phonologie der Alltagssprache (1990), Language in Time (1999, with Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Frank Müller), Sprachliche Interaktion (1999), Türkisch sprechen nicht nur die Türken: Ueber die Unschärfebeziehung zwischen Sprache und Ethnie in Deutschland (with Inci Dirim, 2004), and Aphasie im Alltag (with Angelika Bauer).
Peter Auer has (co-)edited 12 academic books (among them, the Handbook on Language and Space, 2010 [with J.E. Schmid] and the Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication, 2007 [with Li Wei]) and has written more than 100 articles in linguistic journals and edited volumes.
