Where to start with languages?

I was born in a Wolga-German family in Wolgograd and grew up bilingual German-Russian in Berlin. English was the third language in my everyday school and private life. The experience of lived multilingualism, but also the interest in language as a dynamic tool of interpersonal action, brought me to study at the Humboldt University of Berlin (HU) - Slavic Languages and Literatures (B.A.) and Slavic Languages (M.A.) & Sociology. The main languages of my studies were Czech, Russian, and Polish, and my alma mater also gave me various insights into Belarusian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Upper Sorbian, and other Slavic languages.

After completing my master’s degree, I did my PhD on the topic “Author identification and linguistic features of the Rixdorf manuscripts: An investigation based on manuscripts from the 18th/19th Century” (PhD supervisor: Prof. Dr. Roland Meyer) as part of the project “Tracing patterns of contact and change: Philological vs. Computational approaches to the handwritings of an 18th-century migrant community in Berlin” (HU + Fraunhofer IPK + MusterFabrik Berlin), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. I completed my mixed methods PhD in 2020, defended it in 2021 (graded summa cum laude by Prof. Dr. Roland Meyer, Dr. habil. Pavel Kosek, and Prof. Dr. Tilman Berger), and published the book in 2022 at the University Press Winter in Heidelberg (Link to the book). https://www.winter-verlag.de/de/detail/978-3-8253-4912-7/Tikhonov_Sprachen_der_Exilgemeinde/

Until July 2023, I worked as a PostDoc in the project of the University of Oxford and the HU Berlin on the history of pronouns in Celtic, Slavic, and Germanic languages. Since August 2023, I have been a PostDoc at the Slavic Seminar at the University of Zurich. Now, I am primarily dedicating my work to the Slavic languages and multilingualism in German rap. At the same time, until spring 2024, I am developing smart models for the automatic transliteration of Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and Russian manuscripts from the 19th and 20th centuries in the MultiHTR project at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg (PI: Prof. Dr. Achim Rabus).

2018, I discovered for myself the growing popularity of Slavic languages in German rap and have become increasingly involved in synchronous multilingual developments in youth, artistic, and online language registers. I firmly believe that science can and must react to current societal, political, and cultural events, which I also try to implement in my research. As part of my PostDoc project, in which I am creating a corpus of German rap lyrics, I have been working at the University of Zurich since August 2023 on the Slavic languages and multilingualism of post-migrant society in the context of language contact in German-speaking countries. I have already given talks at several conferences and published articles in international journals in Berlin, Konin, Sheffield, Nottingham, Uppsala, Freiburg, and Reykjavik (see publication list). With my research on the topic, I observe and analyze the sociolinguistic phenomenon since its emergence and during its development. The language contact in songs and the self-reflection on the multilingual practices between German, Polish, Russian, BKS, Turkish, and other languages are central to my project.

You can read more about me and my research on my website (www.aleksej-tikhonov.com), and please find some of my texts on language, culture, and society in the so-called "Eastern Europe" in the osTraum Online Journal, which I co-founded in 2016 (www.ostraum.com).

(21) (accepted) Sprach(en)gebrauch von Rapper*innen in Belarus und der Ukraine:  Sprach- und kulturwissen-schaftliche Perspektiven vor und nach der Invasion. In: Kostiučenko, A., Novosolova, M., Rutz, A. (Hrsg.): Mehrsprachigkeit in der Ukraine, Belarus und im Baltikum: aktuelle Tendenzen und historische Hintergründe. Specimina philologiae Slavicae, Peter Lang, Lausanne 2023

(20) (in print) Monate, Feste und Wochenenden: Bezeichnungen von Zeitabschnitten in tschechischen Handschriften des 18.-19. Jahrhunderts in Pennsylvania und Preußen. In: Newerkla, M., Poljakov, F. (Hrsg.): Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2023

(19) (in print) Polish and Russian in German Rap: A corpus study on language contact and social semantics. In: Trojszczak, M. & Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (Eds.). Contact & Contrasts. Language, Literature, Culture, prob. Springer International Publishing, Basel 2023

(18) Processing of the Russian war against Ukraine in the lyrics of Ukrainian rappers in Ukraine, Germany, and Russia. In: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference of Europeanists: Europe’s Past, Present, and Future: Utopias and Dystopias, Columbia University & University of Iceland, Reykjavik 2023 (OpenAccess)
URL: https://aleksejtikhonovcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/aleksej_tikhonov_rap_and_war_ua_ger_rus.pdf

(17) Multilingual practices of East & South Slavonic German rappers and the political aspects of their lyrics. In: Languages, Texts and Society: Political Crisis & Change. University of Nottingham, Nottingham 2023 (OpenAccess)
URL: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/languagestextssociety/documents/lts-journal/issue-6/journal-of-languages-texts-and-society-issue-6.pdf

(16) Deutschrap und der russische Krieg in der Ukraine. In: dekoder, Berlin 2023. (OpenAccess)
URL: https://www.dekoder.org/de/gnose/deutschrap-capital-bra-olexesh-krieg-ukraine

(15) Sprachen der Exilgemeinde in Rixdorf (Berlin): Autorenidentifikation und linguistische Merkmale anhand von tschechischen Manuskripten aus dem 18./19. Jahrhundert (Monografie). Winter Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 2022

(14) Tikhonov, A., Loew, L. Matić-Chalkitis, M., Meindl, M., & Rabus, A.: Multilingual Handwritten Text Recognition (MultiHTR) or reading your grandma‘s old letters in German, Russian, Serbian and Ottoman-Turkish with AI. In: Schwan, A., & Thomson, T. (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, Basingstoke 2022

(13) Der Krieg spaltet: (un)klare Aussagen in der russischen und ukrainischen Rapszene | The War Divides: (Un)Equivocal Statements in the Russian and Ukrainian Rap Scene. In: ZOiS Spotlight 19/2022. Zentrum für Osteuropa und internationale Studien, Berlin 2022

(12) Tikhonov, A. & Müller, K.: Scribe versus authorship attribution and clustering in historic Czech manuscripts: a case study with visual and linguistic features, In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, fqaa004, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2022

(11) Post-Punk in Belarus und Russland: Lyrische Kritik am politischen System oder postsowjetischer Nihilismus? | Post-Punk in Belarus and Russia: Lyrical criticism of the political system or post-Soviet nihilism? In: ZOiS Spotlight 2/2022. Zentrum für Osteuropa und internationale Studien, Berlin 2022

(10) Rap auf Tatarisch: die Abkehr vom Russischen? | Rap in Tatar: Turning Away from Russian? In: ZOiS Spotlight 34/2021. Zentrum für Osteuropa und internationale Studien, Berlin 2021

(9) Tikhonov, A. & Meyer, R.: Scribe vs. authorship clustering in historic manuscripts with LiViTo: A case study with visual & linguistic features. In: Scripta & e-Scripta 21. Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia 2021

(8) Tikhonov, A. (Hrsg.): czEXILe – Lebensläufe tschechischer Flüchtlinge aus Berlin-Rixdorf des 18. Jahrhunderts. Interdisziplinäre Analysen ausgewählter Handschriften. Open Access publication of the contributions of a readings’ series, DOI:10.18452/23642, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin 2021

(7) Tikhonov, A. & Müller, K.: LiViTo: a software tool to assess linguistic and visual features of handwritten texts. In: Paschke, A. et al.: Qurator 2020, Berlin 2020

(6) Multilingualism and identity in German Rap lyrics in the 21st century: Research on artists with Polish and Russian background. In: Gröndahl, S. & Dulić, T. (ed.): Multiethnica, Uppsala 2020

(5) Schulen und Lehrer in der Frühzeit der tschechischen Exulantengemeinde in und bei Berlin im Vergleich zum deutschen und jüdischen Schulwesen. In: Fritsch, A. et al.: Comenius-Jahrbuch, Baden-Baden 2018

(4) Häberlein, M. & Zuanstöck, H. (ed.): Halle als Zentrum der Mehrsprachigkeit im langen 18. Jahrhundert (Review). In: Fritsch, A. et al.: Comenius-Jahrbuch, Baden-Baden 2018

(3) Berlin – Slawisch? Germanisch? Indogermanisch? Zur Etymologie der Ortsbezeichnung. In: Weigl, A. et al.: Junge Slavistik im Dialog VI, Hamburg 2017

(2) Neuhochdeutsche Lehnwörter im Tschechischen: Eine Untersuchung mit den Daten des Tschechischen Nationalkorpus. In: Korpus-Gramatika-Axiologie, Hradec Králové 2017

(1) Štrůdl, švindl, trotl – benutzt ein Tscheche Germanismen? In: Weigl A. et al.: Junge Slavistik im Dialog V, Hamburg 2016