The field trip organised by HALS and the MA in Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities (LingDig) took place in March 2023. The city of Timișoara and the wider Banat region is the most multilingual area in Romania, with several languages spoken there for centuries. Our team spent most of the time between 5 and 11 March in Timișoara, but there were also two-day trips to the town of Nădlac. The team consisted of the organisers, Ekaterina Gruzdeva, Jonathan Banks and Andrei Dumitrescu, and six students representing three study tracks of the LingDig programme: Kristina Sherrill, Anna Sedláčková, Monika Murgová, Natchanun Sanitdee (general linguistics), Mikhail Zolotilin (language technology), and Anna Busheva (phonetics).
The languages studied were Hungarian, Serbian, Slovak and German, the latter including both the standard variety and the local Swabian dialects. A central research topic that involved most of our team was a sociolinguistic study of the language use and attitudes of students at four different high schools where the language of instruction was one of these minority languages. Other research topics included the broader sociolinguistic situation of minority languages, as well as some phonetic and morphosyntactic features of the local varieties of these languages.