230063 Linguistic Diversity in Britain (BS) (SoSe 2013)

Great Britain is a place of cultural diversity and multi-ethnicity. Ever since ancient times, waves of (im)migration as well as the presence of various peoples have helped to shape the character of the British Isles. The linguistic diversity in the British Isles can be attributed to several aspects of language and dialect contact and it can be subdivided into two major strands: On the one hand, there are ‘older languages’, such as Welsh or Irish Gaelic, which still have official status in some areas. On the other hand, there are large groups of immigrants bringing languages such as Polish, Punjabi, Mandarin Chinese, French or Greek into the United Kingdom. In addition, the region is marked by an impressive range of older and more recent (urban) dialectal differentiation, often influenced by language varieties of communities with a longer history of immigration to Britain, for example from the Caribbean. Thus, in this course we will look at the linguistic diversity as it can be observed in the United Kingdom today. We will investigate how the multilingual und dialectal makeup in the British Isles has developed and examine the increasingly complex present-day sociolinguistic situation that characterises the region.