This project focuses on an understudied minority community and their language in Češin, a village near Hamedan, in western Iran. This community has two outstanding features which make them a rare and suitable case for study: First, the inhabitants of…
Description As a regularly repeated ritual, the liturgy consolidates identity as a minority without influencing interactions with the majority in contexts other than religious. Until the liturgical reform of European and North American Judaism in the 19th century, Hebrew as…
Prof. Dr. Jost Gippert Prof. Dr. Saloumeh Gholami Description The specific meaning of the term “Kurdish” depends on the group treated and its region of origin as well as different identity-forming factors (language, religion, culture, ethnic self-definition and definition of…
Description The subproject C2.1 will investigate whether and how the international human rights regime has been able to contribute to the protection of minority rights in Syria. It will be investigated to what extent global institutions and norms of the…
Description The project is dedicated to the formal and textual aspects of the Aramaic identity discourse and consists of two areas: the Syriac script as a formal marker of identity and Christian Aramaic narrative elements or motifs in Aramaic oral…
Description The project looks at communicative practices among younger male Berber-speakers of North African background. Upon arrival in Germany they need to navigate a foreign language environment. As speakers of Berber, or Imazighen (sg. Amazigh), they form part of a…
Description Ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic factors among others combine in forming identities in the Near East, past and present. Against this backdrop, the actual meaning of expressions denoting ethnic and/or linguistic group affiliations like “Arab/Arabic”, “Aramean/Aramaic”, “(As)Syrian” and similar…
Description Migrants try to group and reorganize themselves in the diaspora, which can lead either to local “island construction” or to other forms of networking. The rise of islands has been observable both inside and outside Germany since the first…
Description Abstract The subproject focuses on the linguistic integration processes of newly immigrated children from minority groups of the Middle East and North Africa at primary schools in Hessen. The aim is to clarify the question of how the language(s)…
Description Social factors such as age, educational level and social status affect the speech communication, both in in-group and out-group interactions. Language variety depends on social circumstances such as “who speaks what language to whom and when”. These questions can…