معرفی
Holger Wochele is a Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben (specialised teaching staff) at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Romanisches Seminar, where he teaches French and Italian linguistics. An internationally active scholar in Romance philology, he has held appointments at the University of Vienna, Vienna University of Economics and Business, and several other German-speaking universities since 1998.
Education: He studied Romance languages (French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese) and Slavic studies in Erlangen-Nürnberg, Poitiers, Vienna and Trieste, obtaining a Mag. degree and a PhD (2003) from the University of Vienna.
Research interests revolve around
- Applied linguistics (lay linguistics, language awareness)
- Onomastics (product names, interlingual allonymy, exonymy)
- Morphology and word-formation
- Language pedagogy and error assessment
- Business language and marketing communication
- Historical linguistics of Romanian and other Romance languages
Across more than 150 publications—including monographs, edited volumes and journal articles—he has analysed hotel names, brand naming strategies, error evaluation by lay native speakers, and historical semantics of Romanian constitutional vocabulary. Recent work focuses on the linguistic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on product naming and on multilingual street names in Transylvania.
Awards & distinctions: None explicitly listed.
Supervision & teaching: At Mainz he currently supervises BA and MA theses on French and Italian linguistics, and has previously mentored dozens of students in Vienna. Courses offered range from introductory Romance linguistics to diachronic French/Italian, phonetics, error analysis and onomastics.
Labs & teams: He collaborates with the Names in the Economy research network and is a regular keynote speaker and guest lecturer at European universities (e.g., Innsbruck, Sibiu, Verona).
