The working group in Historical Linguistics explores all aspects of language that make it a subject of interest. At its core, the working group addresses a variety of questions concerned with the mutability and variability of language across all linguistic contexts – from grammar to everyday language use. We also address a range of other topics, including language in literature and media and knowledge of language from a historical perspective. Methodological considerations in linguistics are also an area of focus.

The discussion of theoretically relevant questions in an empirically sound manner is important to us. In addition to traditional methods used in historical linguistics, such as philological analysis of texts and computer-assisted analysis of large text corpora, we also apply experimental approaches taken from psycholinguistics and the social sciences.

While German is the focus of our research, we always take into account a knowledge of the diversity (and sometimes astonishing similarity) of the world’s languages. We address questions such as the following:

• How has German grammar changed?
• In what ways can historical linguistic changes be systematically related to, or even explained by, functional, social, or other factors?
• How and why does language change? What influence do factors such as linguistic contact and interrelationships within a linguistic system have?
• To what extent does contemporary German vary with respect to geographic, social, and other parameters? How is this variation represented in literature and media?
• How are the conditions and possibilities of expression vis-à-vis specific communicative functions, such as politeness, changing? How can regional variations in language use be systematically documented in the present?
• How did people in the past think about language, for example with regard to norms and their variation?
• How has academic thought about language developed over the course of a long-term historical process?