Start on 1 January 2026Funding for Long-Term Research Project on Middle Low German Grammar

1 December 2025, by AW Hamburg / Newsroom editors

Photo: Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel

Texts such as Hamburg’s shipping laws from 1201 also contribute to some of the source material for Middle Low German grammar.

Middle Low German text culture is an integral part of northern Europe’s cultural heritage. A new long-term research project on Middle Low German grammar will deepen our understanding of the linguistic structures of Middle Low German. The goal for the next 18 years is to establish a multidimensional and web-based Middle Low German grammar for research and teaching. The project is being run jointly by the University of Hamburg and the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg.

Middle Low German was used widely in northern Germany from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. It was also an important trade language in the Baltic region as well as at the trading posts of the Hanseatic League from London and Bruges and Bergen to Novgorod. Middle Low German texts therefore form the linguistic foundation for urban life in the Hansa. Sound knowledge of Middle Low German helps us research northern European urban, economic, and religious history. The linguistic variations and evolution of Middle Low German reflect the region’s intellectual and cultural development.

Interdisciplinary cooperation

Prof. Dr. Ingrid Schröder (senior professor of German linguistics and Low German language and literature at the Institute for German Language and Literature), Prof. Dr. Chris Biemann (professor of linguistic technology at the Department of Informatics and director of the Hub of Computing and Data Science), and Prof. Dr. Sarah Ihden (professor of historical German linguistics at the Univerity of Rostock) applied for the €11,88 million research grant. Collaboration across their fields should yield a comprehensive, scientifically sound grammar for Middle Low German in line with today’s research standards and in a form that has not been available before.

Their approach is especially innovative due to their focus on variations, meaning the linguistic variations that they will systematically include for different places, times, and text types. They will also develop an extensive and well-structured digital corpus for the purpose of analyzing grammatical units.

Closing gaps in the research with the help of different disciplines

The planned Middle Low German grammar is primarily to help researchers understand historical texts. At the same time, it will provide the necessary deep knowledge of the linguistic structures particular to Middle Low German as well as German and general linguistics; for example, for comparative linguistics and typology research in Europe. Structurally, Middle Low German lies somewhere between High German and Dutch and English. It also strongly influenced Scandinavian languages.

“We are delighted that we can start our project soon in the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities’ program. The new Middle Low German grammar can finally close a huge gap in the research on historical linguistics,” said project head Prof. Dr. Schröder. For the first time, the incredibly significant lingua franca of Hanseatic trade throughout northern Europe can be described in all of its structural variety in precise detail.

User-friendly and interactive for researchers and students

The target groups for Middle Low German grammar are researchers and students for whom the grammar should meet their specific needs. For the university classroom, they need a compact grammar guide to teach and analyze Middle Low German. For research, a scientifically sound grammar should document linguistic structure comprehensively and describe it in detail.

For these various purposes, the researchers are planning an interactive web interface that facilitates targeted searches for grammar information. The web interface will also allow users to search the corpus itself and its quantitative assessments and further resources, for example, select linguistic and historical databases or the Middle Low German trade dictionary. “Using innovative digital methods of presentation, we can give students and researchers a needs-based learning and research tool,” said Schröder. There will be an interface between the Middle Low German grammar and the portal of the NFDI consortium Text+. There will also be a print version in addition to the digital publication.