PIVOTAL QUESTION IN LINGUISTICS

What makes a variety a variety and what distinguishes it from other varieties?

RESEARCH FOCUS

We explore what makes varieties — such as dialects — coherent and distinct linguistic entities. To this
end, a group of researchers from diverse disciplines and universities, specialising in various fields of
linguistics, have collaborated to address this issue. The researchers involved in this project hail from a
diverse range of academic backgrounds, including but not limited to the fields of computational linguistics,
natural language processing and artificial intelligence research, quantitative linguistics, phonetics and
speech processing, psycholinguistics, contact linguistics, dialectology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

TEAM

Collaboration with several prestigious academic institutions, namely LMU Munich, University of Marburg,
University of Tübingen, University of Bonn, Saarland University and University of Heidelberg.