Research interests

My research centers around the fields of multilingualism, language contact, and minority languages from a sociolinguistic, areal linguistic, and language documentation point of view.

In particular, I aim to investigate the grammatical structures of minority languages in the context of language contact. I am interested to understand mechanisms of language variation and change that arise in settings of long-term multilingualism. This includes situations of balanced bi-/multilingualism as well as language shift and loss. A central research question of my PhD thesis on endangered Romeyka (Muslim Pontic Greek) in Turkey was in which way the grammatical structures of Romeyka are affected by language contact and shift towards Turkish. In my dissertation, I provide the first comprehensive grammatical description of Romeyka from a general typological perspective and under special consideration of contact-induced changes. The methodologies I apply draw on linguistic fieldwork and corpus-based typology together with monitoring of individual and transgenerational multilingual speaker profiles to be able to depict language change in progress and to have certain variables at hand that may serve as explanations for the linguistic structures found in naturalistic spoken language data of minority speakers. With this theoretical interest, I have worked on different case studies, namely Romeyka in Turkey, Oghuz (Turkic) in Iran, and the Linguistic Landscapes of Istanbul.