Czech-German and Slovak-German language contact phenomena

For more than twelve centuries now, one of the most important European areas of language contact has been the contact zone between Germanic and Slavic languages. Such a long time of language contact has almost necessarily led to the exchange of numerous and varied linguistic elements (especially in the direction of the Slavic languages). For centuries, moreover, the adoption of linguistic elements had been reinforced by the local mobility of the contact zones` language boundaries. So far, research has dealt with the recording and linguistic investigation and analysis of lexical, in parts also morphological and phonological borrowing and other contact phenomena between the Bavarian-Austrian dialect and the spoken variants of Czech from a dialectological point of view. However, research work on phonological, lexicological as well as phraseological contact phenomena between German and Czech and between German and Slovak has been done only very rarely and unsystematically at the cultural-historical, literary and standard language level. The project we propose now is designed to deal with the development of language contact between standard German (especially the Austrian variant of standard German) and standard Czech as well as standard Slovak on former Austrian-Hungarian territory. Apart from the completion and supplementation of hitherto collected lexical material and the consolidation of the understanding of language borrowing at the phonological, lexicological as well as phraseological levels, the qualitative innovation of the analyses provided for in the project lies in the up to now unprecedented, synthesising identification, classification and chronological systematisation of phonological, morphological, lexical and lexicological as well as phraseological German language elements (already described or still to describe) in the Czech and Slovak languages at the cultural-historical, literary and standard language level since the eighth century till the beginning of the twentieth century.