Ibero-Romance Linguistics

The professorship represents the linguistics and cultural studies of the (Ibero)Romance languages and countries, above all the two state languages Spanish and Portuguese, but also the regional official languages Catalan, Basque and Galician.

In both cases, it is a question of combining a method - of linguistics or cultural studies - with a concrete object of description, the Romance languages. We therefore pursue either

• "Linguistics", i.e. the science of human linguistic knowledge and languages,
• or "cultural studies", i.e. the science of the material and symbolic dimension of cultures.

In both cases, however, we always also work within "Romance studies", i.e. the science of Romance languages and the associated literatures and cultures.

We see the attempt to place a solid linguistic knowledge foundation between the practical language knowledge and its subject-didactic implementation as the core task of teaching. The practical linguistic knowledge should be theoretically underpinned in such a way that the students are able to

• describe the underlying grammatical facts explicitly and using scientific terminology,
• to read linguistic literature independently and critically,
• as well as to name structural differences to German.

In addition, questions are dealt with in which elements of sociolinguistics and cultural studies flow together:

• Language evaluation, language rights, standard language, regional language, language conflict ...

The topics in cultural studies at the professorship are mostly seen as complementary to those offered by colleagues in literary studies. Instead of a cultural studies of artistic forms of expression, the focus here is primarily on discourses of identity:

• Centre/periphery conflicts
• Regional identities
• Discourses of history

Another integral part of the teaching concept are the annual excursions abroad, which are organised in cooperation with Prof. Haase's department.