Stabilising domains of English-language use in Germany

The growing impact of English in Germany since World War II has largely been dealt with in terms of lexical borrowing. In contrast to this, the present contribution will focus on emerging domains of regular use of English, be it as a lingua franca or as part of multilingual repertoires. Two of these domains, English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) in higher education and English in business and industry, relate to the activities of social elites and have already attracted considerable scholarly attention. Data analysis will, therefore, focus on the diverse types of English-German language mixing which can be observed among two less prestigious and often marginalised groups, namely followers of urban youth cultural movements and the socially disparate group of recent arrivals in Germany from “Anglophone” West Africa. Taken together, these uses of English represent a challenge to the traditional monolingual sociolinguistic order of the nation state because they undermine it from without (increasingly globalised “markets” in business, education and the culture industry) and from within (increasing linguistic diversity of the country’s resident population). My analysis will draw on the “World System of Englishes” model (Mair 2013), enriched by the concept of transnational languagescapes, which I develop on the basis of work on cultural globalisation by Appadurai 1996; Loven 2009; and Pratt 2011.