MINORITY GROUPS AND LANGUAGE DIVERSITY IN GERMANY AND BRAZIL: AN INTERVIEW WITH GÖZ KAUFMANN (UNIVERSITY OF FREIBURG, GERMANY)

Göz Kaufmann, who obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1997, completed his habilitation treatise in 2016 and received the venia legendi (livre docência) in German Linguistics from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He holds a permanent position as a senior lecturer (Akademischer Oberrat) for linguistics in the German Department of the University of Freiburg. Kaufmann’s main research areas are sociolinguistics, language contact, language variation, and language change. In the area of language variation and change, his focus is on German minority varieties spoken in South America, particularly Mennonite Low German and Pomerano. Aside from lexical and morphological variation, he analyzes syntactic variation in these varieties combining variationist and generative approaches. Göz Kaufmann worked in Brazil as a guest professor and representative of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) at the UFRGS and the USP. At the University of Pelotas (UFPel), he has already taught several courses and presented numerous talks. For more information, see http://paul.igl.uni-freiburg.de/kaufmann/?Home