Following the successful final workshop of our project last year, the phase of publishing results has now started – both in academic papers and in the public media.

In a recent issue, Der Spiegel devoted extensive coverage to the topic of informal and formal address (du vs. Sie). In this context, Horst Simon, PI of subproject P1 at Freie Universität Berlin, was interviewed and spoke about the historical change of address forms as well as about VariPrag. The article is available here.

Already in autumn, Laura Fischlhammer and Sabrina Guhe addressed key topics of the project in two blog posts: The two researchers in subprojects P3 and P4 at the University of Salzburg discuss in Der Standard the „fine art“ of historical and present-day forms of address („Küss die Hand, Euer Erlaucht?“, Laura Fischlhammer) as well as complaint practices in digital contexts („Vom Wiener Grant zum Google-Rant“, Sabrina Guhe). 

Since the beginning of this year, two new academic publications from the project context have also appeared, dealing with variation, change, and pragmatic aspects of language use:

• Ackermann, Tanja, Horst J. Simon, Henrik Discher & Janel Zoske. 2026. Variation und Wandel im Bereich höflichkeitssensitiver Ausdrücke. In Annelen Brunner, Gabriele Diewald, Sandra Hansen, Kristin Kopf & Angelika Wöllstein (eds.), Deutsch im Wandel, 345–368. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112240151-017
• Elspaß, Stephan. 2026. Pragmatik. In Stephan Elspaß, Attila Németh, Simon Pickl & Philip C. Vergeiner (eds.), Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel, 201–216. Paderborn: Schöningh Brill. https://doi.org/10.36198/9783838565347