1000 Years of Language Contact: Convergence and Divergence on Gotland

Time period:

1 January 2020 – 31 December 2025

Project leader:

Michael Dunn

Project member:

Erik Petzell

Funder:

Swedish Research Council

Type of award:

Project grant

Total funding:

5,440,000 SEK

Language family histories can resemble genealogies, in which a constant process of diversification produces ‘family trees’. But it is also well-known that language histories are not always tree-like, and it is possible for varieties to converge as well as diverge. The proposed study is a multifaceted investigation of linguistic convergence on Gotland, where Gutnish has coexisted with other languages for a long time. Having a long written history, Gutnish offers a rare opportunity to explore and understand convergence processes in detail.Four subprojects will explore convergence on four levels of linguistic structure. Over four years, the PhD student will investigate phonology and morphology, while the two named investigators will head subprojects on syntax and semantics. They will use historical and modern textual sources, archived audio recordings and original fieldwork to inform methods from historical and descriptive linguistics. A fifth subproject will focus on making the data and results available to the speaker community as well as the scientific community.The project will be a considerable contribution to the very limited research on the important Swedish dialect Gutnish, as well as widening our knowledge of North Germanic languages and of linguistic convergence in general.