The Making of a Mother Tongue: Standardizing European Minor Languages - The Case of Occitan, Yiddish, and Belarusian

该项目旨在以结合历史编纂方法和语言来源（词典、术语等）的跨学科方式，分析三种“次要”欧洲语言（欧西坦语、意第绪语和白俄罗斯语）的标准化过程。它重新审视了19世纪和20世纪初欧洲的国家和地区建设过程。一方面，该项目通过询问语言活动家在社会上推广“他们的”语言时选择的语言规划策略，关注语言的建构主义特征，这一特征很少被注意到。通过对拼写和语法的约束规范以及特定的词汇丰富，他们试图创建一个统一的语言标准（语料库规划）。与此同时，他们试图在那些对母语了解甚少、几乎从不将母语用于写作目的的人（地位规划）中强制执行这一标准。另一方面，该项目希望抵消民族主义和区域主义研究的共同趋势：要么关注西欧，要么关注东欧。因此，它正在进行“差异的确定”（Ulrike von Hirschhausen / Jörn Leonhard），即在选定参数的基础上对“西方”和“东方”的“次要”语言进行系统的比较研究。根据论文，这可以揭示出“西方”和“东方”集体语言认同形成过程之间惊人的相似性，从而使民族和地区语言运动的多样性作为一种泛欧洲现象可见。

The project aims at analysing the process of standardization of three "minor" European languages (Occitan, Yiddish, and Belarusian) in an interdisciplinary way that combines both historiographic methods and linguistic sources (dictionaries, terminologies etc.). It is taking a fresh look at nation and region building processes in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. On the one hand, the project focuses on the constructivist character of language, which is rarely noticed, by asking about the language planning strategies that language activists chose to promote "their" language in society. With the help of binding norms for spelling and grammar as well as specific vocabulary enrichment, they attempted to create a uniform language standard (corpus planning). At the same time, they tried to enforce this standard among speakers who knew only little about their mother tongue and hardly ever used it for the purpose of writing (status planning). On the other hand, the project wants to counteract a common tendency of nationalism and regionalism studies: to focus either on Western or Eastern Europe. Therefore, it is undertaking a "determination of difference" (Ulrike von Hirschhausen / Jörn Leonhard), i. e. a systematic comparative study of "minor" languages in "West" and "East" on the basis of selected parameters. According to the thesis, this can reveal surprising similarities between "Western" and "Eastern" processes of collective linguistic identity formation and thus make the diversity of national and regional language movements visible as a pan-European phenomenon.