Project Leader: Dr. hab. Michał Głuszkowski, Prof. UMK
The aim of the team’s work is to conduct a multifaceted study of linguistic and cultural contact situations. This is a broad research area that may be modified in the future depending on the competencies and interests of team members. Currently, the focus of our research is on issues concerning various types of minorities (ethnic, religious, sexual); the socio-cultural, linguistic, and economic adaptation of immigrants; and the formation of identities of specific groups and social classes from a diachronic perspective depending on external factors (e.g., peasant identities in different partitions of Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries).
The interdisciplinary composition of the team allows for the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, as well as methods and techniques used in various branches of the humanities and social sciences. Primarily, shared research paradigms that integrate multiple disciplines will be applied, such as structuralism and functionalism, along with universal assumptions (e.g., the Frankfurt School, the theory of cultural reproduction, and symbolic violence). While bilingualism and functioning in diverse cultural contexts are characteristics of the contemporary world in general, these phenomena are particularly present in atypical groups, operating on the margins of social life and in various border zones. The most obvious fields of our research include, for example, the issue of language adaptation of Ukrainian students in the Polish education system or Muslim students in a Catholic environment. However, research may also cover interactions between subcultures and their surroundings and the creation of their own languages (sociolects), e.g., teenage K-pop fans. Such diverse research fields involve the use of various types of materials and sources; therefore, the expertise of sociologists and anthropologists will allow for participant observation, historians and archivists will provide archival data, and linguists will utilize corpora.
The project will be conducted within the framework of the detailed research topics mentioned above, whose common denominator is cultural and linguistic contact. Considering different aspects of these phenomena and processes from the perspective of multiple disciplines will facilitate further collaboration within the network of the team’s members.