ABSTRACT
Conceptualizing transregionalism without its corresponding linguistic relations is like attempting to understand content without form, as if one could conceive of ethnic, social, and milieu-specific relations without their linguistic foundations and connections. Transregional contacts take place as communicative, linguistic encounters. Since the advent of discourse theory, one would say that these are discourses that are exchanged across linguistic borders. Against the backdrop of multilingualism, all spaces populated by people – whether within a nation-state, a continent, or between continents – feature regions that are fundamentally affected by differences in language: from the impact of intraregional and international languages on the national language to that of regional variations in the language and local dialects. These regions are perceived as distinct, linguistically constituted language spaces.
