Urban Voices - Linguistic and communicative diversity in face- to-face-interaction of Russian-speaking interlocutors in Saint Petersburg and German cities (DFG-funded network, GZ TH 1506/2-1)

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Face-to-face-interaction in the urban space is characterized by a wide spectrum of differentiation. Communicative situation, composition of the group and social as well as ethnic background of the speakers varies. All these aspects involve processes and mechanisms of accommodation and separation or othering.

The network aims at analyzing how various linguistic, paralinguistic and pragmatic means relate to sociolinguistic dimensions and how they convey social meaning (e.g. display the social, ethnic, local identity of a speaker, the institutional character of a communicative situation etc.). The members of the network focus on different aspects and choose different methods (qualitative as well as quantitative). The design of the network is essentially based on methodological triangulation and assesses the benefits as well as the challenges in applying and combining different analytic approaches.

The overall nexus is established by the work with spoken language, including the collection of data reflecting linguistic and communicative diversity of urban speakers of Russian in Russia and abroad. Long-lasting recordings of a speaker's communicative day of the kind provided by the One day of Speech-corpus (ORD, Saint Petersburg) are a source which is able to reflect this linguistic and communicative diversity.