Research Projects
Colonial Language Materials from Mesoamerica in the Holdings of the IAI
The Ibero-American Institute in Berlin houses extensive materials on Mesoamerican languages that were collected and acquired by Walter Lehmann (1878-1939) and Eduard Seler (1849-1922). Among these materials are included several hitherto unedited original manuscripts and unique handwritten copies of colonial dictionaries and doctrinal texts. The research objective of this project is the documentation, analysis and publication of the IAI’s colonial indigenous language materials from Highland Guatemala. Several K’iche’ and Kaqchikel dictionaries and texts will be edited and disseminated as part of a multi-year project on Highland Maya lexicography by Frauke Sachse (University of Bonn) and Michael Dürr (Free University of Berlin). The project falls into the field of missionary linguistics and will contribute to our general understanding of processes of colonial knowledge generation and the transfer of cultural concepts through missionary language planning.
The project will digitise the relevant manuscripts and in the following stage, make the documents available as philologically accurate editions in book and article form.
Duration: Phase 1: 2015-2018; Phase 2: 2019-2024
Policy, ideologies and linguistic attitudes in 18th- and 19th-century Spain and Hispanic America: an approach from the press and grammatical texts
The project „Política, ideologías y actitudes lingüísticas en la España y América de los siglos XVIII y XIX: un acercamiento desde los textos periodísticos y gramaticales“ aims to investigate the connection between linguistic change and the ideological component of speaking and writing. To this end, it will use journalistic texts to trace this set of external variables, which contributed to the creation of a universe of opinions about language. This combination of little known documentary sources with the different socio-cultural and political variables that would influence the consideration of the object "language" (official language planning and policy; introduction of the printing press; processes of independence; contact of Spanish in monolingual and bilingual territories; exposure of the language to different types of speakers [indigenous; Creoles; natives of Spain...]; teachers vs. grammarians; grammarians vs. Real Academia; grammar and the State; social prestige, etc.) will result in the unification of criteria and methods in sociolinguistic research in the 18th and 19th centuries and the building of bridges towards disciplines such as the history of language.
The project, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Cienca e Innovación and directed by Prof. Manuel Rivas Zancarrón, includes a research team from the Universities of Cádiz and Valladolid and an international working team. At the IAI, Ulrike Mühlschlegel will investigate the paratexts of 18th century Mesoamerican grammatical texts with a focus on the relationship between spoken and written language. An electronic corpus will be created and studied with Digital Humanities tools.
Duration: 2021-2024