Mark Richard Lauersdorf is Associate Professor of Languages and Linguistics and Director of the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities (RCH) at the University of Kentucky. Pursuing his interests in Germanic and Slavic historical sociolinguistics he has spent extended periods in Germany (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz), Norway (Universitetet i Agder, Kristiansand), Poland (Uniwersytet Warszawski, Warsaw), and Slovakia (Univerzita Komenského, Jazykovedný ústav Ľudovíta Štúra SAV, and Slavistický ústav Jána Stanislava SAV, Bratislava), as well as regular stays in northern France. A large portion of his work has investigated historical language contact, language variation, and standardization in West Slavic (particularly Slovak) with two books and a series of articles on the topic of Slovak language standardization in the pre-codification period. He is also interested in issues of historical contact between language families (Slavic-Germanic, Germanic-Romance) across political borders in Western and Central Europe, and the accompanying situations of "indigenous minority languages", language planning, and linguistic legislation.
Books and Edited Volumes
Slavia Centralis (letnik III, številka 1) (with Marc L. Greenberg, Mihaela Koletnik, and Astrid van Nahl) (2010)
Slavia Centralis (letnik III, številka 2) (with Marc L. Greenberg, Mihaela Koletnik, and Astrid van Nahl) (2010)
The Morphology of 16th-Century Slovak Administrative-Legal Texts and the Question of Diglossia in Pre-Codification Slovakia (2010)
This study is a quantitative investigation of a large corpus of 16th-century Slovak administrative-legal texts...
The Question of 'Cultural Language' and Interdialectal Norm in 16th Century Slovakia: A Phonological Analysis of 16th Century Slovak Administrative-Legal Texts (1996)
There is not general agreement among scholars on the degree or type of standardization, or...
Articles
Slavic Sociolinguistics in North America: Lineage and Leading Edge, Journal of Slavic Linguistics (2009)
This article provides a general overview of North American research in Slavic sociolinguistics from the...
Slovak Standard Language Development in the 15th–18th Centuries: A Diglossia Approach, Indiana Slavic Studies (2002)
This study provides a sketch of Slovak standard language development during the pre-codification period (15th-18th...
Book Chapters
Protestant Language Use in 17th Century Slovakia in a Diglossia Framework, Život slova v dejinách a jazykových vzťahoch (Na sedemdesiatiny profesora Jána Doruľu) (2003)
This article presents a discussion of several issues that are central to the ongoing, larger...
Training Teachers of Slavic LCTLs: Student Profiles and Program Design, The Learning and Teaching of Slavic Languages and Cultures (2000)
This article focuses on the differences between Slavic LCTL and Russian "language teaching situations" in...
Kultúrna slovenčina administratívno-právnych textov zo 16. storočia „Čo s fonológiou a morfológiou?“, Varia VII (1998)
It is generally accepted that the present-day Slovak standard language was codified in its basic...
Digital Publications
Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure – Audiocast (with Dorothy Carr Porter) (2008)
The workshop "Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure" took place at...
Digital Scholarship Colloquium II – Official Videocast (2008)
The Digital Scholarship Colloquium (DSC) series provides a venue for campus dialogue among current and...