230028 World Englishes on YouTube (S) (SoSe 2021)

Nowadays, the online video-sharing platform YouTube is responsible for a major share of the world's Internet traffic and, according to YouTube's official statistics, "[o]ver 2 billion logged-in users visit YouTube each month, and every day people watch over a billion hours of video and generate billions of views." (cf. https://www.youtube.com/intl/en-GB/about/press/)
And yet, YouTube data and its platform are virtually absent from (socio-)linguistic research despite the wealth and variety of data provided, especially regarding the varieties of World Englishes.
In this seminar, we will take a good look at YouTube from a linguist's point of view by discussing perspectives from media linguistics, computer-mediated communication (CMC), corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics. We will try to assess whether YouTube is actually suitable for linguistic research projects and how researchers can navigate YouTube in a meaningful way, before students will develop and conduct their own small-scale research projects on YouTube in the context of World Englishes research.

Due to the special circumstances this semester poses, this course will be conducted online with both sychronous (e.g. ZOOM) and asynchronous (e.g. LernraumPlus) elements!

Literaturangaben

e.g.

• Schneider, Edgar. W. (2016). “World Englishes on YouTube: Treasure trove or nightmare?” In E. Seoane & C. Suárez-Gómez (Eds.), World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations (pp. 253–282). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g57.11sch