The Secularisation of Religous Vocabulary against the Background of Social Change - Polish, Czech, Slovak and German

The research projects aims at investigating how vocabulary originally confined to the religious, particularly the Christian sphere ist used in the secular discource of laicistic societies, esp. in colloquial speech and mass media. By means of a contrastive analysis of lexicographic data, electronic text corpora, the language of press and advertising etc. the semantic change in the sacral and profane sphere will be described. The final goal of the project is a reference work available in both a digital and print version which will document the social and political conditions of language change and the role of religion after 1989.