The Project Digitization of Heritage Culture and Language Identity of Serbian Diaspora (HerCuLIS) is aimed at identifying and describing the key socio-linguistic and cultural features of four representative varieties of Serbian as a heritage language outside of Serbia. The study provides the Serbian and the international academic communities with valuable data on the construction of transnational identities in Serbian diaspora communities in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, on one hand, and, on the other hand, it creates an innovative, multimodal database and repository of the Serbian language used in diaspora which supports its maintenance and revitalization.
The key academic objective of HerCuLIS is to provide a taxonomy of Serbian diaspora varieties which would take into account their structural features and socio-cultural and identity correlates and which would serve as the basis for future research of not only Serbian as a heritage language in diaspora, but also of other diaspora languages in a range of socio-cultural, political, ethnic, and religious contexts.
The key applicative objective of HerCuLIS is the creation of an open access repository of multimodal samples of usage of Serbian in diaspora which then can be used not only for further interdisciplinary research but also transdisciplinarilly, targeting public policies, educational policies, political engagement of diaspora communities, etc.