Multilingualism and the Emergence of a New Written Language as a Transformation of Discourse Traditions

A project of the Lumina quaeruntur Fellowship provided by the Czech Academy of Sciences for the years 2025–2029. The project aims to theoretically describe and analyse the mechanisms behind the emergence of new written languages or language varieties within the multilingual contexts of different European cultural traditions during the medieval and early modern periods. The research will compare philological methodologies across traditions. The starting methodological basis is the theory of discourse traditions, which assumes that no written tradition emerges ex nihilo (Koch 1997), but appears as a transformation of a written tradition in contact or as a blend of a vernacular and a contact culture.