About the Journal
Regional languages and their literatures are in a historically conditioned competitive situation with the respective standard languages that roof them. In this competitive situation, regional forms only seldom receive greater attention and visibility in research than standard forms. However, the new Zeitschrift für regionale Sprache und Literatur, with its apt main title RegioLingua, allows the regional to take precedence and offers a multi-faceted forum for studies on language data and texts beyond standard language discourses. It thus opens up a comprehensive field of language reality including its artistic manifestations in the past and present.
The interdisciplinary combination of approaches from the linguistic and literary sciences in the journal’s subtitle places the focus on the language forms involved and not on the methods and research paradigms used. Specific individual disciplines and their respective cultures are not the focus of the journal. Rather, its interest lies in making the far-reaching dimensions of regional language and literature visible in an approach that transcends disciplinary boundaries with an intent to clarify relationships that, up until the present, have been examined to a lesser extent.
In the context of the journal, the term regionale Sprache or Regionalsprache ‘regional language’ refers to any regionally specific or geographically limited variety in the spectrum from the least standard-like base dialects up to the more standard-like regiolects. Accordingly, the term regionale Literatur or Regionalliteratur ‘regional literature’ is first and foremost linguistically determined. Both terms refer to linguistic and literary phenomena that have only acquired their contours through the development of and in contrast to a standard language and a standard-language literature. However, contributions that deal with older stages of language and literary artefacts are also explicitly welcome, provided that they especially address Old Saxon and Middle Low German as older stages of Low German or in general touch upon general questions of regionally conditioned language variation from a historical perspective.
RegioLingua. Zeitschrift für regionale Sprache und Literatur considers itself chiefly as a publication forum for academics and researchers in the early stages of their careers in the fields of German dialectology and regional language research in addition to Low German linguistics and literary studies. It is also open to work on other regionally bound forms of language and literature.
The journal’s purpose and thematic profile are a result of its origins. Since 2011, the Forum Sprachvariation of the InternationaleGesellschaft für Dialektologie des Deutschen (IGDD) and the Nachwuchskolloquium of the Verein für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung (VndS) have been organizing a joint annual colloquium that offers students pursuing a master’s degree, doctoral students as well as post-doctoral researchers working on dialectology and regional language research as well as on Old and Modern Low German linguistics and literary studies the opportunity to present and discuss their projects. From the very beginning, the colloquia have offered presenters the possibility of publishing their contributions in a conference volume. Several volumes have already appeared – either in printed form in the series Kleine und regionale Sprachen (KURS) or the in the journal Germanistische Linguistik (GL), and in other series as well as in the form of a digital special issue in the journal Linguistik Online (LO). In this way, the results of previous colloquia have been published in a rather scattered fashion and are hardly recognizable as a coherent whole. In addition, the question as to how to finance the printing costs arose again and again.
Instead, we founded RegioLingua in order to boost the visibility of current research on regional languages and literatures in all of its manifestations and contexts of use for the long term, to make the editorial and publication process both more structured and more effectual, and to be able to work in a more cost-neutral manner.
The journal is not limited to contributions from the IGDD’s Forum Sprachvariation and the VndS’ Nachwuchskolloquium, but instead explicitly invites early career researchers from German Linguistics and Literary Studies to submit proposals for contributions to the journal. As the editorial and publishing team of RegioLingua, we want to actively promote young scholars, in particular by providing an open forum for academic communication that is open to all.
At the same time, we regard the founding of a new journal with this profile as a dynamic enrichment of the range of established organs of publication for regionally oriented language and literature research (Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, Jahrbuch des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung, Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung, Niederdeutsches Wort, Jahrbuchder Klaus-Groth-Gesellschaft, and others).
The new electronic journal is hosted via the Open Journal Systems (OJS) of the University Library of the University of Marburg and appears as a Diamond Open Access publication. It will be published once a year under the Creative Commons License CC-BY-4.0 and is archived for the long term. We request contributions by March 1. Publication is planned for the fall of each year after careful editing and a peer review process for quality assurance. In addition, thematic/special issues can also be published by guest editors in RegioLingua. The journal’s languages are German and English.
Publication schedule
By March 01
Submission of contributions
By April 01
Initial editing, preparation for the peer review process, sending the articles to reviewers
By June 01
Peer review, forwarding the reviews and editorial results to the authors
By July 01
Revision by the authors
By August 01
Final editing and layout of the volume, dispatch of final proofs to the authors
By September 01
Feedback on the proofs, signing of the declaration of consent for publication
By October 01
Submission of final revisions and publication