Multilingualism is one of the key factors of today’s global society. It is, however, not a recent development, but has a long history in society and in literature. Most of humanity is and has been multilingual. This project examines the long-neglected history of multilingual literature in the 19th
century in the so-called German-speaking area. To this end, the project develops a scalable approach to measure the scale and examine the characteristics of historical multilingual literature. The project consists of three analytical levels which lead to different outputs. First, a list of 19th-century multilingual writers, based on historical biographical and geographical data from biographical dictionaries of German writers (Literaturlexika), will show the amount of multilingual activities in literature. Secondly, the database will serve as the basis for a core corpus consisting of texts written by people active as writers in multilingual cities between 1790 and 1890. Thirdly, case studies on selected literary networks in multilingual centres of the 19th century, on authors, genres and text types show the forms and functions that multlingualism played.