Click on the boxes below each researcher to find out more details about their research project!
Alessia Cassarà
PhD Student at the Univeristy of Cologne
A comparative investigation on Kurdish and Sicilian
I am interested in language attitudes and language perception, especially in situations of diglossia, where a minority language is dominated by an official one. It is often the case that the official language tends to be associated with the notion of linguistic prestige, while the minority language is usually discredited or considered not equally important. As a consequence, today, many families choose not to teach the minority language to their children, with important repercussions for its maintenance. The research conducted in the MISOGRA project suggests that Sicilian in Italy and Kurdish in Iran both exhibit such a situation: Both languages have a non-official status in the country where they are spoken, and are often associated with negative connotations by their own speakers. Building on my own preliminary work on Sicilian, I intend to conduct interviews in Kurdistan with different generations of speakers, with the aim of assessing their perception of the language and whether this perception has changed over time. Hopefully, this will contribute to gain further insights on how the linguistic landscape actually is and on its possible evolution.
Alessia will travel to Sanandaj from September 20th to October 20th and to Tehran from October 21st to November 04th, 2021.
An anthropological assessment of Iranian academic modernisation
An “Academic Culture” is a set of meanings, concepts, common values, and norms that creates a specific framework for social lifestyle, a sense of identity, ethics, habitus, and logics of the acts for academicians. Academic culture generally has some homogeneities with broader cultures, both of their respective communities and of a global scientific community. Hence, while there are different ways to recognize and categorize different academic cultures, most of these categorizations are done by relating each academic culture and milieu to a certain broader cultural field. Iranian academia, as suggested by some social scientists, is mostly influenced by Teutonic and Saxonic traditions. In this research I tried to find similarities and differences between Iranian academic culture and the German one - known as the root of Teutonic culture - by direct and participative observation, and by interviewing students with experience in both settings. According to my preliminary findings, while there are certain similarities in these two settings, they are both also facing strong waves of a global, pragmatistic culture. My findings will be placed in the broader context of my dissertation, dealing with academic modernization in Iran and Turkey, especially regarding the fact that Germany has played a substantial role in authoritative modernization processes in both countries.
Reza stayed in Cologne from May 1st to August 31st, 2021.
Language shift as a politeness strategy in formal register of Kurdish
As a native speaker of Kurdish, I am interested in linguistic features of minority languages. Like many other minority languages in diglossic societies, the Kurdish dialect that I am speaking (Faili Kurdi of Ilam, Iran) does not have a literary form and is used in informal and face-to-face situations. Specifically, it doesn’t have the lexical distinction between formal/informal "you" and instead, speakers use different strategies like "code-switching" to the dominant Persian language to keep the formality and to convey politeness. In order to tap into the relation between code-switching and the distinction between formal and informal registers, I recorded bilingual Kurdish-Persian speakers from my area in different formality settings to see how frequent code switching occurs. I hope to contribute more to this understudied language in my PhD dissertation.
Zahra stayed in Cologne from May 7th to August 7th, 2021.
Contact languages: An investigation on linguistic changes in Farsi and Kurdish
I am interested in the the changes that have occurred to languages due to migration. Therefore, I want to investigate on the two languages, Kurdish and Persian, as two migrant languages practiced among second generation Iranians based in Cologne to see which changes the dominant language (German) has caused. These changes in language will concern lexical and/or morphosyntactic aspects. My project will focus on Persian and Sorani, which is the dominant variety of Kurdish in Cologne, and I hope to continue this study by working on other varieties of Kurdish and migrant languages, i.e. Turkish.
Kiyanoosh will travel to Cologne on October 1st, 2021.
Language maintenance and heritage languages: Kurdish in migrant communities in Cologne
During the spring school on migrant communities and linguistic and cultural identities, I became interested in the transmission and maintenance of heritage languages. In my project, I plan to investigate the situation of Kurdish in migrant communities in Cologne, to find out how and to what degree second-generation Kurds learn the language, or whether the dominant status of Persian can be seen even in migrant communities.
Parastu will travel to Cologne on October 1st, 2021.
Language change through speaker contact: Kurdish dialects
I am interested in language change and the different motivational factors behind it. Languages and dialects that are not constrained and suppressed by a standard dialect tend to implement changes more freely. Based on this assumption, I expect that this phenomenon can be observed particularly well in the region of Kurdistan in Iran, where a broad dialect continuum can be found that is not dominated by one standard dialect. Through getting in touch with the current research on Kurdish dialects and scanning the linguistic landscape for morphosyntactic or syntactic changes, I hope to be able to contribute to this almost untrodden territory of research about Kurdish dialects.
Lena will travel to Sanandaj from September 20th to October 20th and to Tehran from October 21st to November 20th, 2021.
Assistant Professor in Athropology at the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies, University of Tehran
Ethno-linguistic groups: similarities and differences
Social studies of languages and ethnic groups can give us a better understanding of similarities and differences between ethno-linguistic groups. How social identity and interactions between different communities are constructed through language is the arena for interdisciplinary studies. What is important in the field of Middle East studies and Iranology is to understand these linguistic and ethnic diversities, a diversity that, if left neglected, can give background information for social crises and political tensions. From this perspective, such studies can provide the requirements for intercultural and peaceful policies in order to create a platform for mutual understanding and recognition of differences. The MISOGRA project by the University of Cologne and the DAAD provided me with the chance to establish a platform for sharing this type of scientific study and creating new research ideas about ethno-linguistic groups.
Dr. Rahmani stayed in Cologne from May 1st to August 31st, 2021.
Representations of Iran in historical and contemporary travel writing
In my thesis I investigate how perceptions and representations of Iran in popular German travel literature have developed over the course of the past 60 years. I will address how these publications and the genre of travel writing itself can be situated within realm of the German Iran-discourse by deconstructing the problematic preconceptions and reverberations of Orientalism, the authors' narrative techniques, as well as the publishers' sales strategies. While there is a rich inner-Iranian discourse on the subject of both historical and contemporary travel literature, this area is largely overlooked in German travel writing analysis. Therefore, I would like to devote my future studies and academic papers to the analysis of this discourse. In order to gain a thorough overview of the inner-Iranian discourse and to feed this knowledge back into the German discourse about Iran, I will document the authors/actors, publications, institutions and events that have shaped the inner-Iranian discourse on foreign travel writing. For this purpose, I will conduct qualitative interviews in Persian with academic experts from various disciplines and with non-academics from a variety of professional, ethnical, linguistic and religious backgrounds.
Vincent will travel to Iran and stay in Sanandaj as well as Tehran from September to December, 2021.
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