Priv.-Doz. Dr. Annette Endruschat is funded to specialize in documentary linguistics by documenting the language and culture of the town of Minde, in the centre of Portugal with a population of 3380. Minderico is only spoken in Minde and not in any of the adjacent villages. It has to be regarded as highly endangered, because the number of (active) speakers of Minderico has decreased considerably to only a few hundred in the last three decades. In the recent past Minderico has become more and more restricted to the use in informal situations and Portuguese has developed into the main language of communication throughout the Minde region. There are also a few passive speakers who are able to understand Minderico but who do not use it actively anymore. With this project, it is intended to emphasize that there are also unknown endangered languages in Europe and that the Iberian region is not as homogeneous as the language policy of Portugal would like us to believe. Moreover, this project expects to give an impulse to the documentation of the linguistic and cultural richness in the Romance world, an area widely neglected in Romance studies. That is why this project is based on an intensive cooperation between Romance linguistics and general linguistics and typology.
