Events
Donnerstag
08:30
60 min
09:30
30 min
11:15
30 min
The Yeniseian rising/falling tone: Gradient lenition as a window on the evolution of obstruents
The Yeniseian languages are the only known tonal languages in Siberia. In this contribution, we investigate the diachrony of one of the four monosyllabic tones in the closely related Ket and Yugh, and in particular Werner’s (1996) hypothesis that...
References Dalcher, Ch. 2008. Consonant weakening in Florentine Italian: A cross-disciplinary approach to gradient and variable sound change. Language Variation and Change 20(2) Hill, E., S. Fries, I. Kapitonov, L. Günther, and S. Bonmann. 2026. Towards a new reconstruction of the Proto-Yeniseian sound system: Part III: Word-internal consonants. International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, pp. 124–182 Jatteau, A. and M. Hejná. 2018. Gradient dissimilation in Mongolian: Implications for diachrony. Papers in Historical Phonology 3, https://doi.org/10.2218/pihph.3.2018.2821 Kazakevich, O. (ed). 2026. Minority languages of Siberia as our cultural heritage: Lexicon 2.0, Osthoff, H. and K. Brugmann. 1878. Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen. Leipzig: Hirzel. Werner, H. 1996. Vergleichende Akzentologie der Jenissej-Sprachen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Werner, H. 2002a. Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Jenissej-Sprachen. Vol. Band I: A–K. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Werner, H. 2002b. Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Jenissej-Sprachen. Vol. Band II: L–Š. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Werner, H. 2005. Die Jenissej-Sprachen des 18....
11:15
30 min
The Divergence of Sino-Korean Vocabulary in North and South Korea:
The Impact of Language Policies After the Division of the Korean Peninsula
11:15
30 min
Cavineña, or, (almost) Everything is an Enclitic
A look at some features of the indigenous Cavineña language through the lens of its extensive clitic system
Cavineña is an ergative Tacana language spoken in the Bolivian part of the Amazon. Notable for its large number of enclitics and strict rules concerning prosodic wordhood, it also displays rules for cliticizing roots to usually independent...
Cavineña exhibits several sets of enclitics, including postpositions/case markers, several types of particles, subclause markers, and a set of enclitic pronouns that behave differently from their independent counterparts. Their tendency to loose markers has even made earlier grammars question Cavineña's state as a (morphologically) fully ergative language (Guillaume 2006). On top of always-enclitic portion of the vocabulary come phonological processes eliminating monosyllabic words: Monosyllabic roots without any affixes are forced to take dummy suffixes or become pro- and enclitics, depending on context (Guillaume 2008). Guillaume, Antoine (2006). „Revisiting “Split Ergativity” in Cavineña“. In: International Journal of American Linguistics 72:2. S. 159–192. DOI: 10.1086/507164 Guillaume, Antoine (2008). A Grammar of Cavineña. Berlin und New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN: 978-3-11-018842-4
11:50
30 min
Be Water, My Friend — But Don't Get Arrested
Conceptual Metaphors and Corpus Evidence of BE WATER in Reddit Discourse between 2019–2020 on the 2019 Hong Kong Protests
In 2019, Hong Kong protesters adopted Bruce Lee’s “Be water, my friend” as a tactical slogan. Lee had drawn on Daoist philosophy of water in developing his martial art, Jeet Kune Do. A previous qualitative study (Wong, 2023) mapped how protesters...
11:50
30 min
Does writing influence spoken language?
First results from a cross-linguistic study.
It has long been claimed that subordination is more common in writing (Chafe 1982: 35–52; Ong 1982: 36–38; inter alia). Furthermore, in languages with a long written tradition this frequency is increased in spoken language. A more recent claim is...
Chafe, Wallace (1982). “Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature”. In: Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Ed. by Deborah Tannen. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 35–53. Dąbrowska, Ewa (2020). “How Writing Changes Language”. In: Language Change: The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca. Ed. by Anna Mauranen and Svetlana Vetchinnikova. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–94. Ong, Walter (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.
12:25
30 min
Sentiment Arcs in Manga: From the Page to Polarity Analysis
Sentiment analysis of literary texts is not new. In the past, for example, dramatic works by various authors have been examined to see how the sentiment of words develops over the course of a play. Similar approaches also exist for screenplays,...
12:25
30 min
Multimodal Cues in the Interpretation of Imperative Speech Acts
An Empirical Investigation
Imperatives present a classic form-function mismatch in language since the same imperative utterance can be interpreted as a command, plea, permission, advice, or other speech act, while similar communicative functions can also be expressed...
The talk presents the theoretical background, research questions, and methodological design of an ongoing dissertation project. The first study investigates the production of imperative-related speech acts (commands, pleas, permissions, and advice) and examines whether these categories are associated with recurring patterns in linguistic form, prosody, gesture, facial expression, gaze, and posture. The resulting audiovisual recordings form the basis of a planned follow-up comprehension experiment, which tests which cues listeners use when identifying intended illocutionary force and whether force recognition depends on individual cues, multimodal cue configurations, contextual information, or interactions between these sources.
12:25
30 min
Prosody in Language Documentation
A proposal for analysis of Macanese Portuguese and Maquista
I will be presenting the methodological outline for the work I have been doing with LabFon at the university of Lisbon, its theoretical outline and possible impact in areas such as typology, prosody, contact linguistics and the documentation of...
The poster will focus on giving a brief overview of the state of Maquista and Portuguese, I will focus on the why prosody might be useful for documentation even at an early phase, giving examples of syntactic isomorphy with prosodic grammar and further outline a hypothesis for a possible Sprachbund effect going on with the languages, especially the contact languages, of the South China Sea with some of my preliminary observations to further encourage research into this topic.
13:00
60 min
14:00
90 min
14:00
90 min
Phonetics Lab Tour(s)
Please register for this event via this link: https://terminplaner.dfn.de/public/bookings/2a2719f3-56f3-442b-bc3b-04613bacf3d0
14:00
90 min
15:30
60 min
15:30
60 min
Investigating germanic urban vernaculars under neo-emergentism - a proposal for a comparative analysis
My presentation will be about my idea to do a comparative study of germanic urban vernacular varieties analyse them, in particular I want to relate the results to the neo-emergentist framework and to diachronic language changes.
Language change in children is discussed frequently in the literature on language change (e.g. Cournane (2019)). I believe that innovations in the speech of adults may provide new insights and perspectives on language change. I’d like to focus especially on how innovation by adult speakers may be accounted for by the neo-emergentist framework (see Biberauer (2019), et seq.). The proposed project’s contributions to the field are twofold: For one, urban vernaculars remain an under explored phenomenon While my idea for this project departs from the by now well-studied german urban vernacular Kiezdeutsch I intend to investigate varieties that have not received so much attention as well (e.g. south african urban vernaculars). The second contribution I wish to make is to the understanding of phenomena in adults’ speech, such as the urban vernaculars I wish to concern myself with. Innovations of adult speakers pose a not yet well-understood facet of change that scientists are only beginning to interpret based on the existing data of these varieties. As I intend to analyse the innovations and changes adult speakers make in these varieties a neo-emergentist view to analyse. This could...
15:30
60 min
"W chat or L chat?" Measuring Emote Toxicity Across Twitch Communities
Live-streaming platforms such as Twitch are central meeting hubs for young people, and their chats are dominated by emotes, small images posted alongside or instead of words. Emotes help build shared repertoires and community identity, but they...
The poster is based on a term paper written for the seminar "Research Trends" at the University of Bonn, supervised by Prof. Dr. Robert Fuchs.
15:30
60 min
Illusion of Intelligence
Sycophancy, Hallucination, and the Limits of Understanding in LLMs
This paper asks what ChatGPT’s inability to self-correct, express uncertainty, or resist user pressure reveals about the nature of machine “understanding.” Drawing on empirical studies of sycophancy (Sharma et al., 2023; Adler, 2025), the...
examines how models are structurally trained to validate and flatter rather than challenge and correct. explores how hallucination and overconfidence are not malfunctions, but rather a predictable outcome of a particular incentive system. Turns to the philosophical question at the root of all three failures: what it would actually mean for an AI to know something, and whether that bar is met. Finally, it considers the real-world stakes of these failures and what individuals, institutions, and developers ought to demand from these systems going forward Sycophancy is defined as user excess flattery and agreeing with the user against good reason Hallucinatino is defined as generation of confident, fluent, and plausible-sounding false information, output that is fabricated, but delivered with the same tone and certainty as output that is accurate
15:30
60 min
Sprachliche Vereinfachung und Komplexität
Kausalitätsmarker zwischen DaF und Leichte Sprache
Das vorliegende Dissertationsprojekt untersucht die systematische Reduktion sprachlicher Komplexität an der Schnittstelle von Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF) und Leichter Sprache (LS) am Beispiel der semantisch-logischen Kategorie der Kausalität....
Die vorliegende Dissertation befasst sich mit sprachlicher Komplexität und deren Vereinfachung durch die Verflechtung von Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF) und Leichter Sprache (LS). Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht dabei die semantisch-logische Kategorie der Kausalität, die als essenzielle Relation gilt, um komplexe Ursache-Wirkungs-Dynamiken menschlicher Erfahrung präzise zu strukturieren (Breindl/Walter 2009; Breindl/Volodina/Waßner 2014). Dieses kausale Gefüge umfasst sowohl spezifische lexikalische Ausdrücke als auch komplexe syntaktische Strukturen, welche im weiteren Sinne ebenfalls finale, konsekutive, adversative, konditionale und konzessive Beziehungen vermitteln (vgl. z. B. Breindl 2004; Di Meola 2004). Obwohl das wissenschaftliche Interesse an Sprach- und Textvereinfachung stetig wächst, fehlt bislang ein einheitlicher methodischer Rahmen für die Kausalität in der Fremdsprachendidaktik. Zwar sind hierzu in jüngster Zeit einige Studien erschienen, jedoch beschränken sich diese meist auf den interlingualen Kontrast zwischen Italienisch und Deutsch (Corso 2025b) oder fokussieren primär Aspekte der syntaktischen Komplexität (Borghardt 2022). Die systematische Verknüpfung...
15:30
60 min
Acoustic correlates of word stress in Turkish converbs
Keywords: converbs, word stress, acoustics, Turkish
This study acoustically investigates word stress in Turkish manner -(y)ARAK and temporal -(y)INCA converbs using production experiment data. Analyzing f0, duration, and intensity via Linear Mixed-Effect Models (LMM), the expected findings suggest...
In Turkish, converbs function as non-finite verbal adjuncts that encode distinct semantic relations, such as manner with -(y)ARAK and temporal sequence with -(y)INCA (Sezer, 1983; Göksel & Kerslake, 2005; Bağrıaçık, 2018). Turkish converbs provide a suitable testing ground for investigating how suffixation shapes word stress (see Kabak & Vogel, 2001; Inkelas & Orgun, 2003; Kamali & Samuels, 2008; Güneş, 2015; Erguvanlı Taylan, 2015; Özçelik, 2017). Converbial suffixes (e.g., -(y)ArAk and -(y)IncA), which deviate from the default word-final stress, constitute a rich domain for examining the acoustic realization of stress in Turkish. This study aims to examine these two converb types acoustically. It investigates whether they differ in f0, duration, and intensity, proposing that converb type systematically shifts the acoustic realization of stress. To this end, the present study addresses two main research questions (RQs): (a) What are the acoustic correlates of stress in Turkish manner converb (-(y)ArAK) and the temporal converb (-(y)IncA)? (b) To what extent do these correlates differentiate stress between the two converb types in Turkish? To answer the RQs, a...
15:30
60 min
Linguistic Knowledge as a Resource for AI, Digital Education and Cross-Cultural Business Communication in the Multilingual World
Liakhova Kateryna
In an increasingly digital and multilingual world, effective language skills are really important for education and international professional environment. Word stress is an important feature of a word’s sound structure and sits at the intersection of phonology and morphology. It plays roles: how words are pronounced; affect how clearly speech is understood; how well spoken messages are comprehended. That’s why studying stress patterns is important for understanding language structure, creating learning materials and speech technologies. The study compares the stress patterns of Ukrainian and Russian nouns and investigates it's distribution across different grammatical forms. By linking accentology with the analysis of morphological structure, it is examined the role of stress paradigms in organizing pronunciation and the potential uses of comparative linguistic analysis in teaching pronunciation and creating digital language learning materials. The received linguistic knowledge are useful for further exploring how AI can be applied in language education and communication technologies, using the information to organize targeted pronunciation practice and provide personalized...
15:30
60 min
Why Slovene Is Not a Pro-Drop Language (and Why Using This Term Can Be Problematic)
The poster challenges the well-established term ‘pro-drop’ and argues that it reflects an English bias. Based on corpus data from Slovene, it shows that the term inaccurately describes a language where the absence of pronominal subjects is the...
19:00
120 min
Freitag
09:30
30 min
09:45
60 min
10:55
30 min
Stressed Vowels in Batsbi
An Exploratory Acoustic Investigation of Vowel Quality and Duration
This presentation reports on an exploratory acoustic investigation of stressed vowels in Batsbi (Tsova-Tush), an endangered Nakh language spoken in a single village in eastern Georgia. The data were collected during the Zemo Alvani Field Research...
The study focuses on stressed vowels in CVC and CVCVC words. Since unstressed vowels in Batsbi are frequently subject to reduction, the analysis is restricted to stressed syllables in order to provide a more stable basis for acoustic comparison. Vowel realizations are examined in three contexts: isolation, sentence-initial position, and sentence-final position. Acoustic analysis is based on vowel duration and the first two formants (F1 and F2), allowing for a preliminary assessment of vowel quality and contextual variation. Particular attention is paid to methodological challenges arising from exploratory fieldwork, including heterogeneous elicitation contexts, speaker variation and the selection of suitable acoustic measures. While descriptions of Batsbi phonology exist, instrumental studies of its vowel system remain limited. The present study therefore aims to contribute an initial acoustic perspective on the language and to establish a foundation for future research. Rather than presenting definitive conclusions, the talk discusses preliminary observations regarding vowel production across speakers and contexts, evaluates the usefulness of different acoustic measures, and...
10:55
30 min
Zwischen Zirkuszauber und Zukunftsangst. Eine korpusbasierte Sprachgeschichte der Saltimbanques im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts
Im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts bieten Saltimbanques als wandernde Komödianten der breiten Bevölkerung kleine Spektakel dar. Ihre Lebensbedingungen und ihre gesellschaftliche Stellung verändern sich im Zuge politischer Umbrüche und der...
Im Mittelpunkt steht ein Wortfeld rund um saltimbanque, forain, banquiste, bateleur und bilboquet. Die Untersuchung verbindet zwei Perspektiven: Onomasiologisch wird gefragt, welche Bezeichnungen miteinander konkurrieren und in welchen Kontexten sie auftreten. Semasiologisch wird verfolgt, wie sich Bedeutung und Wertung einzelner Wörter im Lauf des Jahrhunderts verschieben. Grundlage ist ein Korpus aus Presse, Literatur und Dokumenten, die aus dem Schaustellermilieu selbst stammen, ergänzt durch lexikographische Quellen. So lassen sich Fremd- und Selbstbezeichnungen systematisch aufeinander beziehen. Soziokulturell richtet sich der Blick auf die Spannung zwischen Darstellungen, die Not und Prekarität in den Vordergrund rücken, und solchen, die Schausteller als Künstler verklären. Gemeinsam gehen wir der Frage nach, wer wen wie nennt und ob sich bestimmte Wertungen an einzelne Bezeichnungen, Textsorten und Sprecherperspektiven knüpfen. Ansätze der historischen Soziolinguistik und der Korpuslinguistik bilden dafür den Rahmen.
10:55
30 min
“Auf einmal ich geh Pause“: Morphologische und syntaktische Innovationen in der multiethnischen Jugendsprache Wiens
1. „Wenn ich so Flugzeug bin und ich hab kein WLAN“ 2. „Auf einmal die reden schlecht über mich hinter meinen Rücken“ 3. „Aber deren neueste Lied ist FaceTime“ Diese drei Aussagen von Wiener Jugendlichen wirken auf den ersten Blick ungrammatisch....
10:55
30 min
11:30
30 min
Metaphorische Verwendungsarten der polnischen Präposition po
Versuch der Übertragung einer für das Russische entworfenen Einteilung auf das Polnische
Die Fragestellung beschäftigt sich mit den metaphorischen Verwendungsarten der polnischen Präposition po ‚über, durch‘. Diese Thematik wurde bisher in der Forschung selten als Ganzes betrachtet, und wenn, dann nur wenig detailliert, weswegen das...
Ergebnis einer Hausarbeit zu einem Proseminar mit dem Titel "Raum und Zeit in den slavischen Sprachen"
11:30
30 min
Lippenmuskelaktivität und Betonung
Eine EMG-Untersuchung
In einem Experiment wurde die Lippenmuskelaktivität in Abhängigkeit der Betonung mit Hilfe von Elektromyographie gemessen. Die bei der Muskelaktivität entstehende Spannung sowie die Dauer der Muskelaktivität werden durch eine Elektromyographie,...
11:30
30 min
Idiolinguistics in Action: Exploring Affect and Entrenchment at the Individual Level
Linguistic research often seeks patterns that generalize across speakers and communities. But what can we learn when we take the individual speaker as our primary unit of analysis? The VolkswagenStiftung project Idiolinguistics addresses this...
11:30
30 min
Conceptual metaphors involving body parts in Taruma (South America)
Talk about conceptual metaphors involving body part vocabulary in Taruma (Guyana, South America)
Many conceptual metaphors originate directly or indirectly from bodily experience (see Sullivan 2017, Gibbs 2017). However, even though having a body is a shared human experience everywhere, metaphors involving the human body are not universal across all languages (see, e.g., Yu 2007, Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013, Gibbs 2017). Rather, research on Basque, Mandarin Chinese and Australian Indigenous languages indicates that body metaphors are often culturally specific to some extent (see Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013, Yu 2007, Evans & Wilkins 2000). This shows the importance both of including underrepresented languages in cognitive linguistic research and of integrating their respective cultural context into the analyses (see also Rice 2017 for an overview of the contributions of Indigenous language research to the field of cognitive linguistics). Conceptual metaphors involving body part vocabulary are also found in Taruma, a highly endangered and as of yet undescribed Indigenous language of Guyana (see Eberhard et al. 2025): examples include doya ada ‘house head’, i.e., ‘roof’, or achirahĩ ‘think’ being derived from achi ‘eye’. Following Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson...
12:05
30 min
(th)-variation in Nigerian English
A corpus-based investigation of interdental fricative realisation in Educated Nigerian English
This talk examines variation in the realisation of interdental fricatives in Educated Nigerian English using the phonetically annotated Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). The dataset comprises 799 tokens produced by...
This talk examines variation in the realisation of interdental fricatives in Educated Nigerian English using the phonetically annotated Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). The dataset comprises 799 tokens produced by 44 speakers in broadcast discussions, news, and talks. The data is analysed with a mixed-effects binomial logistic regression model that takes into account language-internal as well as language-external factors.
12:05
30 min
"Alles für Stadt und Verein"
Exploring the connection between a city and its football club on transgressive stickers
Stickers of football clubs can be seen everywhere in the city. But what do they tell us about the connection between the club, the city and its fans? This talk discusses referencing schemes on such stickers under the framework of semiotic...
12:05
30 min
Lesen mit einer Hörbehinderung
Zum Einfluss des Hörvermögens auf die Lesekompetenz
Es ist offensichtlich, dass eine Hörbehinderung zunächst die auditive Sprachverarbeitung betrifft. Beim Lesen werden die Informationen jedoch über die Schriftsprache und nicht über auditive Kanäle übermittelt, sodass diese Modalität für...
12:45
60 min
14:00
60 min
Quarto for academic writing
Quarto is a free, open-source publishing system for literate programming, i.e. the combination of text and code in a single document. With Quarto, scientific papers, presentations, websites, and other outputs can be created and rendered to a...
14:00
60 min
Let's Talk AI
How Are Linguists Using AI Tools?
How are linguists currently using AI tools in their research, teaching, and everyday academic work? What opportunities do these tools offer, and what challenges do they pose? This event invites students of linguistics to exchange experiences with...
How are linguists currently using AI tools in their research, teaching, and everyday academic work? What opportunities do these tools offer, and what challenges do they pose? From literature reviews and academic writing to data annotation, transcription, and language teaching, AI tools are becoming increasingly accessible and finding their way into many aspects of linguistic work. At the same time, their use raises important ethical questions. This event invites students of linguistics to come together and explore how AI tools are being used across different areas of linguistics. Rather than focusing exclusively on technical developments or theoretical debates, we want to create a space for exchanging practical experiences, sharing useful tools and workflows, and discussing the opportunities and limitations that participants have encountered in their own work. Possible topics include the use of large language models in linguistic research, AI-assisted literature searches and academic writing, corpus linguistics and data analysis, transcription and annotation, language learning and teaching, as well as questions of reproducibility, data privacy, bias, and responsible AI use. We...
14:00
60 min
'You want war with Athena, you gonna get war': Verbal Threatening in English
Verbal threats may appear in a variety of contexts, such as ransom notes or courtroom proceedings, but also in non-forensic contexts such as everyday interactions or reality television (Muschalik 2018; Tompkinson 2023; Neumaier 2025; Pollmeier...
14:00
60 min
Conlang Lab
A Hands-on Workshop in Building a Language Together
In this interactive workshop, we will collaboratively create a constructed language (conlang) from scratch. Starting with a brief introduction to language construction, participants will explore how linguistic systems are built by making decisions...
Conlanging, or constructed language creation, is a highly linguistic hobby or an occupation for some people who create languages for various entertainment purposes, whether it is for personal projects, books, or Hollywood movies. Although most people aren't aware of this hobby, people in the linguistics community have likely heard of it or even engaged in conlanging themselves. Since creating a language requires a basic understanding of linguistics, conlanging is a perfect pastime for linguists. In my experience, the number of people who do conlanging is incredibly low, even among linguists. That is one of the reasons I have decided to create this workshop; my goal is to break the illusion of conlanging being something difficult or obscure in nature. Conlanging can be really fun and a great way to understand some theoretical concepts in linguistics. In this workshop, there is no prior knowledge or experience in conlanging necessary; anyone can join and participate in language creation themselves. Starting from the goals of the language, we will create the sounds, morphology, syntax, and semantics (to some degree) of the language. After creating the vocabulary needed for the...
14:00
60 min
(The) Writings on the Wall - Linguistic Landscapes as a Research Method
This workshop will serve as a basic introduction to the field of Linguistic Landscapes, the study of public signage. After setting the scope of the field and discussing ways for data collection, we will work on an actual dataset and investigate...
15:00
45 min
15:00
45 min
15:45
30 min
"If they cease to function, they cease to live": Exploring pain communication among the Bolivian Quechua people
The ability to feel pain is universal to all human beings, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or age. It has been shown, however, that the exact nature of one’s pain experience, i.e. how humans perceive and react to pain, is all but universal and can differ greatly depending on one’s cultural and social identity (Craig and MacKenzie 2021). This becomes especially clear when observing pain communication in multi-cultural and multi-linguistic environments, where misunderstandings frequently occur when medical practitioners and their patients derive from different cultural backgrounds (Zborowski 1969). This study explores how the Quechua people of Bolivia, South America, use language to describe and express painful sensations. More specifically, we investigated how the Quechua people communicate pain among their community members and in medical settings, and how cultural and linguistic barriers may lead to issues in pain diagnosis and treatment. For this purpose, we conducted semi-structed interviews with 7 native speakers of Bolivian Quechua and 12 medical practitioners (monolingual Spanish as well as bilingual Spanish and Quechua speakers) with extensive experience in treating...
15:45
30 min
Reproduction of Gender Sensitive Language effects on Job listing views
Open science as a movement has created more opportunities for high-quality linguistic research. Through increased access and transparent scientific practices, early career linguists have more avenues for collaboration and paths to prove their...
Intended for those interested in learning about and getting involved in open science/reproducible science practices. Knowledge of R and Quarto might be useful but not a necessity.
15:45
30 min
The od(d) behaviour of Polish comparatives
In Polish, there are multiple constructions available for expressing the comparative. Two of them – namely those introduced by particles ‘niż’ and ‘od’, respectively – show diverging behaviours: Despite them being mostly synonymous, some syntactic...
15:45
30 min
Rhyme AND Reason: The Linguistics of Hip-Hop
A linguistic analysis of selected hip-hop works, focusing on rhyme, rhythm, and lyricism
We'll focus on three central aspects of hip-hop music: rhyme, rhythm, and lyricism. First, we'll conduct a schematic analysis of rhyme schemes across artists to understand the phonetic properties and patterns that underpin the art form. Then,...
16:00
180 min
16:20
30 min
Lexikalische Lücke bei der Übersetzung
Bekämpfung lexikalischen Lücken bei der Übersetzung eines fachhistorischen Aufsatzes aus dem deutschen ins tschechischen
Der Beitrag zeigt anhand konkreter Beispiele aus einem fachhistorischen Text, dass sich nicht alle sprachlichen und terminologischen Besonderheiten eindeutig in die Zielsprache übertragen lassen. Im Mittelpunkt stehen daher verschiedene...
Der Beitrag befasst sich mit den Herausforderungen, die bei der Übersetzung wissenschaftlicher Fachtexte auftreten können, insbesondere wenn sich für bestimmte Ausdrücke keine eindeutigen zielsprachlichen Äquivalente finden lassen. Dabei wird gezeigt, dass eine vollständige Anpassung an die Zielsprache nicht immer möglich oder sinnvoll ist und dass je nach Textsorte, Kontext und Funktion unterschiedliche Übersetzungsstrategien zum Einsatz kommen können. Anhand ausgewählter Beispiele aus der Übersetzung eines fachhistorischen deutschsprachigen Artikels über Exorzismus werden verschiedene mögliche Vorgehensweisen und ihre konkreten Auswirkungen auf die Zieltextgestaltung vorgestellt. Der Beitrag soll somit einen praxisnahen Einblick in die Entscheidungsprozesse beim Übersetzen geben und zeigen, wie mit lexikalischen und terminologischen Übersetzungsproblemen umgegangen werden kann.
16:20
30 min
„Absolutes Unding, bei uns wird nicht gedopt“ – Wahrheitsverfälschung und -verhüllung von Doping im Radsport
Eine exemplarische, linguistisch-pragmatische Analyse
Egal ob Jan Ullrich oder Lance Armstong – zu Zeiten dieser Fahrer war der professionelle Radsport nachweislich dopingverseucht und nahezu jeder Profi nutzte im Verborgenen leistungssteigernde Substanzen. Natürlich sollte dies nicht ans Licht der...
germanistische Linguistik, Pragmatik, angewandte Linguistik
16:20
30 min
Informationsstrukturelle Analyse der Satzanfänge eines mittelkymrischen Erzählzusammenhangs
Mein Vortrag widmet sich der syntaktischen und funktionalen Analyse eines Kapitels aus Brut y Brenhinedd, der walisischen Übersetzung der Historia regum Britanniae von Geoffrey of Monmouth. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Wortstellung und insbesondere...
16:20
30 min
Austronesian Voice Typology and the Historical Development of the Indonesian Type: Insights from Borneo and Beyond
Austronesian symmetrical voice languages have typically been classified into two groups, namely Philippine- and Indonesian-type languages, a distinction made on purely typological grounds. While the former are viewed as more conservative,...
16:50
30 min
Heritage speakers of Latvian in Germany: language biographies and language skills
Around 27,000 Latvian citizens are registered as living in Germany, and some of their children grow up with Latvian at home and German almost everywhere else. This can lead to inherently different language skills, even among speakers of the same...
16:50
30 min
„[...] der war so dümming“
Das mecklenburg-vorpommersche ing-Diminutiv und sein Gebrauch
Das ing-Diminutiv ist singulär im deutschen Sprachraum: Es durchbricht die binäre Unterteilung deutscher Diminutivsuffixe in l- und k-/ch-Suffixe und tritt produktiv nur im mecklenburg-vorpommerschen Niederdeutschen und der regionalen Hochsprache...
Im deutschsprachigen Gebiet werden zwei Haupttypen der synthetischen Diminutivbildung unterschieden: Bildungen mit l-Suffixen wie -lein, -le oder -erl und solche mit k-/ch-Suffixen wie -chen oder -ken (Ehlers, 2011: 79; Schmuck, 2009: 35). Diese Unterteilung „wird durch das singulär in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern auftretende -ing-Suffix durchbrochen“ (Schmuck, 2009: 35). Es gilt daher als Abgrenzungsmerkmal des mecklenburg-vorpommerschen Niederdeutschen gegenüber anderen niederdeutschen Varietäten (Ehlers, 2011: 91; Müller, 1902: 39; Teuchert, 1952: 83), aber auch als „ein salienter Marker der hochdeutschen Regionalsprache“ (Ehlers, 2011: 91). Der Vortrag rekonstruiert zunächst die strittige Herkunft des Suffixes. Neben Teucherts (1952) These einer adverbialen Etymologie (-inge) wird die dominierende Annahme einer patronymischen Herkunft (-inga) diskutiert, die Schmuck (2009) mit der westfälischen Ostkolonisation nach Mecklenburg-Vorpommern verbindet. Aufbauend auf Schmucks Grammatikalisierungspfad wird der Übergang von der Zugehörigkeitsbedeutung über die patronymische Funktion zur hypokoristischen und schließlich diminuierenden Verwendung nachgezeichnet. Im zweiten Teil steht der...
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30 min
Substrate Interference from Dravidian in Marathi
In recent decades, the idea that the Indo-Aryan language family has been influenced through intimate contact with Dravidian languages has been popular among scholars of South Asian linguistics. One particular Indic language, however, seems to have...
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30 min
Between Arabic and German: linguistic contact and identity in German Gangsta Rap
My thesis investigates the influence of diaspora languages on contemporary German, with particular attention to Arabic, in the context of the migration processes that have shaped Germany over the past three decades. The first part focuses on...
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60 min
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180 min
Samstag
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60 min
Die Politisierung des Privaten: Instrumentalisierte Trauer in Todesanzeigen und Kondolenztexten zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus
Wie (totalitäre) Herrschaftssysteme bis in Privates, Emotionales und Alltägliches eindringen, wird in vielen Disziplinen erforscht – auf sprachlicher Ebene in sozio-/politolinguistischem und diskursanalytischem Rahmen auch in der Linguistik....
08:30
60 min
Die kognitiven Prozesse und die Wahrnehmung hinter einer polysynthetischen Sprache anhand des Beispiels Lakota
This poster tackles the incremental processing of a polysynthetic language in Lakota. We will rely on prior research on polysynthetic (although not ot the same degree) languages and continue from there on with hypotheses regarding the nature of...
The aim of the talk is to explore the forms through which the cognitive processes of speakers of polysynthetic languages can be understood and decribed through the lense of a polysynthetic language (namely Lakota) and the combination of both cognitive data and language data.
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60 min
Present Perfect in L2 English: The Role of L1 Background and Proficiency Level in Temporal Adverbial Use
This study investigates how L1 background and proficiency affect temporal adverbial use in L2 English present perfect constructions, using written learner data from ten Asian L1 groups (ICNALE). Results show L1 differences and an increase in...
This talk investigates how L1 background and proficiency affect temporal adverbial use in L2 English present perfect constructions, using written learner data from ten Asian L1 groups (ICNALE). Results show L1 differences and an increase in adverbial use with proficiency.
08:30
60 min
Committing to Slurs
And How Propositionality Can Make Us Implicit
Committing to Slurs Slurs remain a prominent topic in common ground pragmatics, and perhaps not due to their unique workings, but due to their very ordinary, but strongly exemplified properties. The common ground, as usually understood is taken as...
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60 min
Figuring out doxastic attitude verbs in Romanian: Aspect and entailment
Using a poster as visual support, I will be presenting part of the research I completed for my BA thesis about factive change-of-state doxastic predicates in Romanian.
In this talk, I will examine the aspectual classification of change-of-state doxastic predicates in Romanian, an Eastern Romance language previously understudied on the topic. As a subclass of propositional attitude reports, these verbs describe an individual’s mental state with regards to a proposition and, more specifically, they encode a transition in belief. Studies on English have identified a group of change-of-state doxastics that are also factive, presupposing the truth of their complement, and referred to them as “come-to-know” verbs (e.g. discover, find out). For instance, “Mary discovered that the Earth is round” suggests that the Earth is indeed round; negating the statement, “Mary did not discover that the Earth is round”, does not affect the truth of the embedded sentence and only highlights that the subject has not yet acquired the information. My research advances the discussion of “come-to-know” predicates and their properties by investigating Romanian. First, I identified five Romanian verbs that fit in the category by using the MegaVeridicality database of English attitude verbs as a starting point; then, I checked how their entailment projects and I tested...
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60 min
The Impact of Multilingualism and its Implications for Language Use and Well-Being among First-Generation Russian-Speaking Immigrant Students in Germany
My poster to shares insights from my research on the experiences of first-generation Russian-speaking immigrant students in Germany. Germany has undergone a remarkable demographic shift. Currently, one in every six university students comes from...
08:30
60 min
Cartographic Erasure: Critical Toponymy, Africanisms, and Female Names in Brazilian Quilombola Territories
This presentation examines toponymic trends in Brazilian Quilombola communities, focusing on female place names (anthropotoponyms) and the presence versus the erasure of africanisms. Drawing from critical toponymy, sociolinguistics, and digital...
This study investigates naming trends and the linguistic landscape across Afro-Brazilian Quilombola territories. Analyzing patterns from over 2,800 communities, the research highlights two core dimensions: the visibility of women through female anthropotoponyms as markers of matripotency and ancestry, and the tension between the preservation of africanisms and the systemic processes of their linguistic and cartographic erasure by colonial bureaucracies. Methodologically, the research integrates relational database architecture and spatial mapping tools to demonstrate how traditional place names serve as decolonial ideological signs, challenging historical invisibility and affirming ancestral identity across the Brazilian landscape.
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60 min
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30 min
Representing Schizophrenia in British News Media: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis
This study investigates how schizophrenia is represented in the British press from 2020-2024, examining the left politically leaning newspaper The Guardian comparative to the right politically leaning newspaper The Times. Using purpose-built...
09:30
30 min
Non-local interpretations of expressive adjectives
Expressives such as "damn" convey a negative speaker attitude, but the target of that attitude is often not the expression’s syntactic sister. In "The dog ate the damn cake", the speaker may be understood as upset at the dog, the cake, or the...
Expressives such as damn convey a negative speaker attitude whose target is not fixed by the sentence’s structure. In "The dog ate the damn cake", the attitude can be construed with respect to the whole proposition (the speaker is upset that the dog ate the cake), the subject referent (upset at the dog), or the object referent (upset at the cake). How the target is resolved, and what constrains it, is debated. Pragmatic accounts (Potts 2005, 2007) treat expressives as an independent speech act that can target different constituents, with the ambiguity resolved by inference. Within this tradition, the culprit hypothesis (Frazier, Dillon & Clifton 2015) holds that the attitude is preferentially construed with respect to an individual who could be held responsible for the described eventuality. A more recent proposal, the valence hypothesis (Glauch 2026), states that expressive adjectives preferentially target the discourse referent that is more negatively valenced than the other potential targets in the sentence. If valence guides target selection, it is unclear whether the effect is categorical or continuous. Furthermore, psycholinguistic work suggests that emojis...
09:30
30 min
Code-Mixing in den Linguistic Landscapes von Hongkong
Die Arbeit untersucht empirisch das Phänomen des kontaktinduzierten Code-Mixings auf Schildern der Straßen Hongkongs. Dabei ist Code-Mixing zwischen Chinesisch bzw. Kantonesisch und Englisch die dominante Strategie; andere Sprachen tragen meist...
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30 min
Grammaticalization Paths
On the Applicability of the Progressive-Imperfective Shift Proposal
This work is the result of a collaborative term paper project for a seminar on aspect and language change; we want to present it here in order to present our ideas and develop them further based on the feedback.
Grammaticalization research is a necessarily intersectional field of inquiry for multiple reasons. Firstly, tracking the development of a grammatical category requires the fusion of synchronic and diachronic approaches into cohesive accounts (Weinreich et al., 1968). Secondly, patterns of grammaticalization are conditioned by the grammar of a given language, resulting in typological differences between languages with regards to how their respective grammars may develop over time (Bybee et al., 1994). Thirdly, cases of grammatical change have been linked to the interplay of (morpho-)syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors (Comrie, 1976; Bybee et al., 1994). Theories of grammaticalization that seek to adequately explain patterns of grammatical change should thus be able to describe: (i) the properties which make grammatical categories susceptible to change in the first place, (ii) the factors which trigger and maintain dynamics of change, and (iii) the precise mechanisms driving those dynamics (Weinreich et al., 1968). The proposal in Deo (2015) attempts to provide a comprehensive theory of grammaticalization paths on the example of unidirectional cyclic change observed for...
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30 min
Noch Angst oder schon Hoffnung? Affektmobilisierung und Weaponisation of Emotions im politischen Diskurs über FRIEDEN und KRIEG
In politischer Kommunikation repräsentiert Sprache nicht primär die Realität. Vielmehr sind die persuasive Erzeugung von Zustimmungsbereitschaften von Rezipient*innen und die Legitimierung politischer Maßnahmen zentrale Funktionen von politischer...
AHMED, S., 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DAPHI, P. / MEIER, L. D. / MÜHE, M., 2026. Zum Stand der deutschen Friedensbewegung: ein Mapping friedenspolitischer Organisationen in Deutschland. In: Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung. DEMARIA, C., 2020. Post-conflict Cultures. A Reader. London: CCCP Press. GEORGI, C. 2021. Angstkonstruktionen zwischen „sinnvoller Vorsicht und sinnloser Panik“: Eine korpuspragmatische Studie zu Sprachgebrauchsmustern im Umfeld des Lexems Angst in Online-Zeitungen. In: FILATKINA, N./ BERGMANN, F., (Hrsg.) 2021. Angstkonstruktionen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Annäherungen an eine Zeitdiagnose. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 219-264. KOSCHUT, S., 2026. Political captivity and the weaponisation of emotions in international relations. In: European Journal of International Security, 1-20. MCINTOSH, J., 2021. Language and the Military: Necropolitical Legitimation, Embodied Semiotics and Ineffable Suffering. In: Annual Review of Anthropology 50, 241–58. NIEHR, T., 2014. Einführung in die Politolinguistik. Gegenstände und Methoden. Göttingen/Bristol: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ORTNER, H., 2014. Text und...
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30 min
Bildung und Verwendung von "i-Wörtern" (Omi, Profi, Mausi, usw.)
Formation and Meaning of "i-Words" like bestie, yuppie, doggie, etc.
Der Vortrag soll eine Beschreibung des Phänomens einer (informellen) Kurzwortbildung mit -i im Deutschen und Englischen darstellen, die womöglich auch im Ungarischen, Niederländischen und Französischen existiert. Es wird erläutert, wie scheinbar...
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30 min
The Effect of Task Types on Fluency
A study on young, intermediate learners of English
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30 min
Geschlechtergerechte Sprache in der Politik Frankreichs - Korrelationsanalysen mithilfe von Instagram
Im Fokus dieser Masterarbeit steht eine produktionsorientierte Analyse von Instagrambeiträgen französischer Politiker:innen, die Aufschluss darüber geben soll, inwiefern soziodemografische Parameter, insbesondere Geschlecht, Alter und politische...
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60 min
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75 min
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30 min
Why pain may be better than you think: Affective ratings for pain words in Bolivian Quechua
Databases of affective norms aim to provide information on the affective properties of selected stimuli. Affective databases with verbal stimuli exist for a number of Indo-European languages, such as English (Bradley and Lang 1999), Italian (Montefinese et al. 2014), German (Lahl et al. 2009), or Dutch (Dimitrova et al. 2022). Few also exist for non-Indo-European languages, such as Mandarin Chinese (Ying et al. 2024) or Indonesian (Sianipar et al. 2016). However, there is a clear lack of data on non-WEIRD cultures, leading to a strong bias towards Western cultures and considerable limitations concerning the generalizability of affective properties of emotion words (Gerges et al. 2025). This is probably partly owed to the fact that, in order to ensure large participant samples, researchers usually rely on online crowdsourcing for recruitment, which some underrepresented non-WEIRD populations do not have access to. We conducted a pilot study aimed towards the creation of a database of affective norms for pain words in Bolivian Quechua. We collected affective and psycholinguistic ratings from 17 native speakers of Quechua for two subsamples of 15 pain-related nouns (e.g. uma nanay...
13:00
30 min
"Have you had the surgery?"
A study on politeness in conversation with trans people
Politeness appears to decline in conversation with minorities. This observation motivated the study for my BA thesis, which more specifically looks at the question "Have you had the surgery?" posed to trans people. This question is often inferred...
This talk is based on the study I conducted for my BA thesis in linguistics at the University of Oslo. While marked as sociolinguistics, it also contains pragmatics and some semantics. Politeness theory as created by Brown and Levinson is the very core of the analysis. I use it to examine whether the question is a face threatening action, and if so, whether it threatens positive or negative face the most. If you're familiar with sociolinguists discussing face, you might be confused as to why I'm not using Arundale's Face Constituting Theory instead. Don't worry, I will justify this choice. And if you'd like to see someone be a professional hater of a theoretical framework for a moment: this is the talk for you.
13:00
30 min
If the child knows 'dog', when is 'frog' learnt? – The effect of form-meaning overlapping on word acquisition
The development of the early vocabulary is a central question when investigating language acquisition. As pointed out by previous research, semantic and phonological neighbourhood density play an important role when determining which words are...
13:00
30 min
Because is Why!
On the use of lama as a causal conjunction in Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew has many causal conjunctions, which differ both in their syntactic distribution and in the types of causality they express. Here, the colloquial causal conjunction "lama", which is derived from the question word "why", is examined....
In this talk, we will look in depth at the causal conjunction "lama" in colloquial Modern Hebrew. Some corpus data will be presented, showing that "lama," as a causal conjunction, can cover three types of causality, which were also attributed to the causal conjunction "ki" by Livnat and Yatziv (2003). These types both revolve around causal relations between real-world events in the content of the utterance, as well as the reasoning of illocutionary acts. The talk then turns to the restricted syntactic distribution of "lama" clauses, namely, that they are bound to the final position with regard to the main clause. To understand it and study whether it interacts with pragmatic/semantic inferences, this distribution is compared with parallel cases in English, Japanese, and Chinese in which a causal clause is final-posed. We will conclude that "lama" clauses do not share the pragmatic inferences with final position causal clauses in those languages. However, like Modern Hebrew, where causal conjunctions differ in structure and meaning, it is evident that German also has two distinct causal conjunctions: "weil" and "denn." We will see how "lama" and "denn" share analogous...
13:45
90 min
Can we trust linguistics research?
How to test the reproducibility and robustness of published studies in the language sciences
Please register for this workshop beforehand: https://terminplaner.dfn.de/public/bookings/52fa8967-8ecf-4320-b46a-67ab9b662661. Dear workshop participants, We are really looking forward to meeting you all on Saturday afternoon! To participate in the hands-on part of our workshop, you will need to bring a laptop (a tablet will unfortunately not suffice) and have installed both R and RStudio prior to the workshop. If you already have these installed, please update them to the latest version. You will find details installation instructions here: https://elenlefoll.github.io/RstatsTextbook/4_InstallingR.html#installing-r-and-rstudio. Alternatively, you can simply come and listen and try things out later at home. We will share all our materials after the workshop. Best, Elen & Ali
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90 min
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180 min
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60 min
ELAN workshop
Workshop about the basics of using ELAN for annotating media files
14:00
60 min
How to assess multilingual(s)?
Sprachdiagnostische Herausforderungen im Kontext von Mehrsprachigkeit
Auch wenn Einsprachigkeit oftmals noch als Norm angesehen wird, ist Mehrsprachigkeit – insbesondere in unserer heutigen Gesellschaft – in vielen Kontexten nicht mehr die Ausnahme, sondern spiegelt die sprachliche Realität wider (vgl. De Bot 2019,...
Literatur: De Angelis, G. (2021). Multilingual testing and assessment. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800410558 De Bot, Kees. 2019. Defining and Assessing Multilingualism. In: J. W. Schwieter (Hrsg.), The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism, 3–18. Hoboken: Wiley. Gantefort, C., Barberio, T., Busch, L. & Goltsev, E. (2025). Tackling the challenge of cons truct validity in assessing newly arrived learners’ receptive skills: Investigations on a multilingual online-based diagnostic tool. Frontiers in Communication, (10), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1537384 Goral, M., Antolovic, K., Hejazi, Z., & Schulz, F. M. (2024). Using a translanguaging framework to examine language production in a trilingual person with aphasia. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 39(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2024.2328240 Köhler, C. & Hartig, J. (2020). Assessment im Kontext von Mehrsprachigkeit. In: I. Gogolin, A. Hansen, S. McMonagle & D. Rauch (Hrsg.), Handbuch Mehrsprachigkeit und Bildung, 303–308. Wiesbaden: Springer. Marx, N. (2020). Transfer oder Transversalität? – Designs zur Erforschung der...
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60 min
Breslau or Wroclaw, /londn/ or /london/, Beijing or Peking - what languages do with foreign place names, transnationally
Have you ever learned a language in which your home city suddenly has a different name or pronunciation, or in which you had to add inflectional endings to it that seemed unusual? Or have you maybe looked at a map in German and been thankful to...
This workshop focuses on a topic that I have been interested in for a while. Any language is faced with the question of what to do with foreign place names. You might use the exact same word with a very close pronunciation as people from that region (endonym), or you might have a special word that is different from the „home“ word (exonym). There might also be some type of phonological or morphological adaption, or the foreign place names could remain outside of otherwise applicable grammar rules. This will likely depend on the combination of languages, and in many cases there seem to be strong traditions. German, for example, seems to have a rather complex system. In German, you would generally pronounce British-/English-/American place names as in English – but not in the case of London. French place names would be pronounced more or less as in French (Avignon, Marseille…), but saying /pa‘ri/ for Paris would somehow be too much. Using traditional, old German names is common for many cities across Europe and beyond (Mailand, Breslau, Straßburg, Moskau, Peking…), but there might be changes – is it still adequate to speak of Breslau after 80 years of Wroclaw as a Polish city, you...
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