239612 English in the Information Society (S) (SoSe 2013)

The world today is believed to be more globalized than ever before, partly because of faster means of transportation and communication. The spread of English is part of this trend, and thus, in addition to the economic, the political, the cultural, and ideological there is a linguistic dimension to globalization. For instance, in this globalised world an increasing number of non-native speakers use English as their lingua franca to communicate. With the emergence of computers and the Internet, our communication patterns have changed in many ways. In today's information society, we increasingly favour communication by e-mail, blogs, instant messaging, or social networks such as Facebook, over traditional channels such as letters, telephone, or face-to-face conversations.
In this seminar we will explore the contexts of use and the features of English as a language of the Internet and as a lingua franca in business and academic institutions. We will also have a look at the research methodology that is typical of the information age: corpus linguistics. Among the topics dealt with are: the relationships among languages on a global scale, the global spread of languages, intercultural communication in global contexts, educational implications, (local) identity formation in a global world, and many more.