High-profile award: Dr. Hoffmeister receives Hugo Moser Prize!

High-profile award: Dr. Hoffmeister receives Hugo Moser Prize!

On March 11, 2025 it was announced that Dr. Toke Hoffmeister will be awarded the prestigious Hugo Moser Prize 2025. The prize, which is endowed with 7,500 euros, will be presented on March 12, 2025 during the 61st annual meeting of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim. This award recognizes Hoffmeister's exceptional research on the interaction between language action and language structure as well as between individual language use and collective patterns.

Dr. Toke Hoffmeister is a postdoc at the Research Training Group 2700 “Dynamics and Stability of Linguistic Representations”. He is also a research assistant at the German Language Atlas Research Center and the Institute for German Linguistics at the Philipps University of Marburg. He currently represents the professorship for German linguistics at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel.

Research focus and methodology

Hoffmeister's research is particularly concerned with how dialect speakers switch between regional and standard language forms. He analyzes how grammatical structures change over time through language use. He uses language data from everyday conversations, experimental neurolinguistic measurements and historical language developments.

A central goal of Hoffmeister's work is the development of an empirically based linguistic theory in order to make human language actions better understandable. His findings contribute to deepening our understanding of linguistic patterns and their processing in the human brain, which is of great importance for modern linguistics.

The Hugo Moser Prize

The Hugo Moser Prize has been awarded every three years since 1987 and is a highly respected recognition in German linguistics. It is awarded by the Hugo Moser Foundation in the Donors' Association for German Science and the Scientific Advisory Board of the IDS. The foundation was established in honor of Hugo Moser, the first president of the IDS, and his wife Hildegard Moser and recognizes innovative research work in this area.

In various projects within linguistic research, such as the SiGS project (Sentence-Internal Capitalization in German), the development of capitalization in German is examined using historical documents. Such projects reflect the important role that historical linguistics plays in understanding linguistic developments. The study of language history and its changes is crucial to understanding the depth of the modern language, as is also shown in the overview of the history of the German language - starting from prehistory to the current linguistic situation in Germany.

With dedicated researchers like Dr. Hoffmeister further consolidates the discipline of German studies, which not only benefits science but also society. The award ceremony is therefore not only an individual honor, but also an appreciation of the significant contribution to research into the German language and its structures.