Modern societies are shaped by migration, multilingualism and cultural transformation processes. As a global phenomenon, multilingualism has a lasting impact on social structures, values and cultural identities as well as economic and political systems and educational institutions. This calls for increased sensitivity in humanities research and teaching towards the polyphony of languages and cultures, which is increasingly developing from an exception to a social norm.

Multilingualism and cultural transformation not only reflect societal dynamics and serve as resources for linguistic communication, but also function as primary instruments for knowledge discourse, educational acquisition, the construction of identities, and the negotiation of social coexistence.

The aim of the core research area is to foster new perspectives on social, institutional and individual manifestations of multilingualism, migration and the resulting cultural transformations through interdisciplinary research in the humanities. Synergies are to be created through collaborative research and research activities are to be sustainably networked at a faculty and university level.

The research projects in the core research area will be organised along the three perspectives of space - time - actors. In social, cultural, political or imagined spaces of multilingualism and language contact, actors and artefacts are at the centre of the examination of linguistic and cultural transformation processes. Within the core research area, the focus is also placed on language acquisition, language mediation, translation and associated mediation activities. In areas of multilingualism, such as in the education or health sectors, in economic or cultural institutions, multilingual actors with their diverse linguistic practices, attributions of meaning or constructions of meaning will increasingly take centre stage. Multilingualism, migration and cultural transformation will also be examined from a historical perspective along the dimension of time. With its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary potential, humanities research plays a central role in reflecting on linguistic inequalities in their temporal dimension and critically examining the political discourses surrounding them.

In the spirit of rethinking the humanities in light of the multiple challenges facing contemporary societies—and in recognition of the high social relevance of multilingualism, migration and cultural transformation—the focus area will integrate critical thinking with fieldwork and enable research at the intersection of theoretical foundations and applied perspectives. A key objective and task in this context is to foreground the transfer of scholarly findings into both teaching and society. This close link expresses the commitment of future-oriented humanities to help shape pluralistic societies and to find joint inter- and transdisciplinary solutions to the multiple crises and challenges of the present and the future.