Linguistic fieldwork: documenting the West Armenian varieties of rural Anatolia

Dozentinnen/Dozenten:

Elke Hartmann, Geoffrey Haig, Laurentia Schreiber

Angaben:

Seminar, 2 SWS, ECTS: 5, Modulstudium

Termine:

Mi, 8:15 - 9:45, MG2/01.02

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

Diese Veranstaltung ist belegbar für

• Elite-MA Cultural Studies of the Middle East/Kulturwissenschaften des Vordern Orients: PLing3 Language documentation and analysis oder PLing4 Fieldwork
• MA-General Linguistics Modul 3 „Sociolinguistics of Minority Languages“ (8 ECTS) oder Modul 4 “Linguistic Research Methods” (10 ECTS)

No special knowledge of Armenian is required, but we expect students to be willing to acquire the basics. A knowledge of at least the traditional categories of grammar is expected, and knowledge of Turkish would be an advantage, though is not mandatory. The course will involve travel to Berlin at least once; arrangements will be finalized at the beginning of term.

Inhalt:

Up until the beginning of the 20th Century, Armenian was among the most widely-spoken languages across Anatolia. Today, the only viable community in situ are the Hemshinli (also known as Homshetsma) in the eastern Black Sea region, who converted to Islam at least two centuries ago. However, in the diaspora, scattered speakers do remain from Christian communities from other parts of Anatolia. This seminar aims at compiling a selection of language materials from the spoken vernacular of West Armenian (as opposed to the standard written language widely used in publishing and education in the Armenian diaspora), and making it available as a joint documentary project, preserving a record of a rapidly disappearing cultural memory. Students will thus have an opportunity to acquire an understanding of West Armenian language and culture in its historical context, and to apply the techniques of modern language documentation (recording, transcription, presentation of language material).
The course is jointly organized by Prof. Hartmann, an expert on West Armenian culture and history, and a native speaker of the language, Prof. Haig, an expert on language documentation and analysis, together with Laurentia Schreiber, who is a PhD researcher on linguistic minorities of Turkey. After a brief introduction to the historical and cultural background of the West Armenian communities in todayʼs Turkey, and a short linguistic introduction to West Armenian, we will begin working on speech material gathered with diaspora speakers from Berlin, and (hopefully) with material from Hemshinli speakers now living in Istanbul. The aim is to create a documentary record, including recorded texts, and short grammar sketch, embedded in the framework of a larger project on the history of the Armenian culture in West Armenia.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Haig, Geoffrey. 2017. Western Asia: East Anatolia as a transition zone. In: Hickey, Raymond (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, 396-423. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Himmelmann, Nikolaus. 2006. Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In: Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus Himmelmann and Ulrike Mosel (eds.) Essentials of language documentation. Berlin: Mouton, 1-30. Martirosyan, Hrach. to appear. The Armenian dialects. To appear as Ch. 2.1 in: Haig, Geoffrey and Geoffrey Khan (eds.) The languages and linguistics of Western Asia: an areal perspective. Berlin: Mouton. [pre-publication pdf available to course participants) Vaux, Bert. 1997. Ethnographic materials from the Muslim Hemshinli. Annual of Armenian Linguistics 17. Vahé Tachjian (ed.), Ottoman Armenians. Life, Culture, Society, Vol. 1, Berlin 2014 Elke Hartmann, Armenisches Leben im Osmanischen Reich vor 1915: Zwischen Hoffnung und Gefährdung, in: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, Dossier: Aghet – Genozid an den Armeniern (26.04.2016); http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/genozid-an-den-armeniern/218100/armenier-im-osmanischen-reich

Multilingualism

Dozent/in:

Laurentia Schreiber

Angaben:

Seminar/Hauptseminar/Proseminar/Übung, 2 SWS, ECTS: 5, Modulstudium

Termine:

Di, 18:15 - 19:45, U2/01.36

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

• Elite-MA Kuturwissenschaften des Vorderen Orients/Cultural Studies of the Middle East, Modul PLing 2

• Master „General Linguistics“ Mastermodul 2 „Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel“

• Bachelor-NF „Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft“ Vertiefungsmodul

Inhalt:

The formation of the European nation states in the 19th century has put forward the notion of monolingualism, which is closely related to the states’ national language which has been set as the linguistic ‘default case’. As, however, a closer look at societal diversity reveals, this does often not reflect linguistic reality which leads to conflicts with the so-called ‘minority languages’. The linguistic landscape of the Middle East exhibits a particularly rich linguistic diversity of both larger and many smaller - and often endangered - languages belonging to several language families. In this class, we address both societal and individual aspects of multilingualism: sociolinguistic questions on i.a. language policies will be discussed alongside relevant linguistic concepts and theories on i.a. language contact (Matras 2009; Silva-Corvalan 1994; Thomason 2008, language variation and change (Alexiadou & Lohndal 2016; Meisel 2011), (bilingual) language acquisition (Meisel 2006; Montrul 2008; Schmid et al. 2004), and heritage languages (Montrul 2015; Polinsky 2018). Case studies discussed in this class will have a particular areal focus on minority languages in Turkey, such as Romeyka, and Turkic varieties in Iran. The aim of this course is to provide the participants with the basic theoretical knowledge of how to analyse linguistic variation within a multilingual speech community and enables students to develop and write a term paper on a topic related to multilingual language use.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Bhatia, Tej. K & William C. Ritchie (eds.). 2013. The handbook of bilingualism and mutlilingualism, 2nd edn. Wiley-Blackwell. Rosenhouse, Judith. 2013. Bilingualism/Multilingualism in the Middle East and North Africa: A Focus on Cross-National and Diglossic Bilingualism/Multilingualism. In Bhatia, Tej. K & William C. Ritchie (eds.), The handbook of bilingualism and mutlilingualism, 2nd edn. Wiley- Blackwell. 899-919. Stavans, A., & Hoffmann, C. 2015. Multilingualism. (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.