230060 Language and Globalisation (BS) (WiSe 2015/2016)

The world today is believed to be more globalized than ever before, partly because of faster means of transportation and communication. Among other things, this has facilitated the exchange of goods and information and has thus led to increased mutual cultural influences across national and regional boundaries. 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. And while in the social sciences the topic is increasingly less debated, linguistics has only recently seen the publication of ‘The Handbook of Language and Globalization’ (2010). According to the editor of this volume, linguistic perspectives on globalization [...] now constitute an independent discourse of globalization” (p.8). 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.