Support for Minority Languages

The MHRA plays a vital role in sustaining the study of those European languages and cultures that are under-supported as fields of scholarship in the UK. This includes not just minority or regional languages but also languages that, despite having large speech communities and a national base, fall outside the small group of languages privileged in UK education and research.

Two journals, Portuguese Studies and The Slavonic and East European Review, provide a forum for research into the literatures and cultures of the Lusophone countries and of Eastern Europe respectively. As part of their mission to promote scholarly endeavour in under-supported fields, both of these journals publish articles in the field of history (which is otherwise excluded from the work of the Association).

Articles on any of Europe's languages and cultures can be submitted to The Modern Language Review. The MHRA's annual critical bibliography, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, casts its net as widely as practicable, covering, amongst other languages, Portuguese, Catalan, Dutch, Romansh and the Scandinavian, Slavonic and Celtic languages.

The Association also supports work on Europe's post-classical historical languages: The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, for instance, covers work on Medieval Latin, Neo-Latin and Provencal.

Austria represents a special case, as a minority culture rather than a minority language, but the recent revival by the MHRA of the journal Austrian Studies will play an important role in ensuring that the field of Austrian Studies is able to develop its own research questions and methodologies, rather than being subsumed under German Studies, a process that has the effect of smoothing over essential differences between Germany and its smaller German-speaking neighbour.

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