title: "Voices of the people": linguistic research among Germany's prisoners of war during World War I.
abstract: This paper investigates the history of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, a body that collected and archived linguistic, ethnographic, and anthropological data from prisoners-of-war (POWs) in Germany during World War I. Recent literature has analyzed the significance of this research for the rise of conservative physical anthropology. Taking a complementary approach, the essay charts new territory in seeking to understand how the prison-camp studies informed philology and linguistics specifically. I argue that recognizing philological commitments of the Phonographic Commission is essential to comprehending the project contextually. My approach reveals that linguists accommodated material and contemporary evidence to older text-based research models, sustaining dynamic theories of language. Through a case study based on the Iranian philologist F. C. Andreas (1846-1930), the paper ultimately argues that linguistics merits greater recognition in the historiography of the behavioral sciences.
authors.affiliation: jrhkaplan@gmail.com
authors.forename: Judith
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kaplan
mesh_terms: D005858:Germany; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics / Q000266:history* / Q000295:instrumentation; D011329:Prisoners / Q000266:history* / Q000523:psychology; D047828:World War I