New three-years DFG-funded research project starting in April 2022

Judeo-Spanish in Bulgaria: a contact language between archaism and innovation
Principle investigators: Bistra Andreeva (UdS), Tania Avgustinova (UdS), Susann Fischer (Hamburg), Christoph Gabriel (JGU Mainz)

This project has an empirical, corpus-linguistic and a theoretical goal. On the basis of newly collected data, the Judeo-Spanish spoken in Sofia (western Bulgaria) and Plovdiv (eastern Bulgaria) as well as the respective Bulgarian contact varieties will be contrastively analyzed. By contrasting selected phonological and morphosyntactic features (e.g. vocalism, intonation, pronouns, word order) of the two Judeo- Spanish varieties with modern Iberian Spanish, the corresponding urban varieties of Bulgarian and with Old Spanish, we aim to gain a better understanding of the status quo of the Judeo-Spanish spoken in Bulgaria. Furthermore, the project aims to contribute to the current research questions in language contact research addressing which linguistic areas are vulnerable to contact-induced change.