Historical foreign language textbooks digital

The “Historische Fremdsprachenlehrwerke” (FSL) (Historical Foreign Language Manuals) are multilingual, practice‑oriented texts for learning one or more foreign languages that have become increasingly widespread since the early modern period. These works, written by so-called language masters, reflect linguistic interaction across Europe in the pre-modern era and are a valuable source for research into cultural history, the history of knowledge and the history of language. They provide a detailed perspective on the practice of foreign language acquisition and an approach to everyday language communication, but have hardly been systematically studied in depth to date.

This long-term project is the first to focus on full-text indexing, corpus linguistic processing, annotation, digital networking, and linguistic, cultural, and historical analysis of the foreign language manuals, with a particular emphasis on material containing German. The project aims to explore and examine the practical forms of imparting knowledge about vernacular languages and written and, above all, oral everyday communication in the multilingual context of early modern Europe. The historical foreign language manuals will be edited from a philological perspective, sustainably processed and made available for further scientific analysis.