34.764, Review: Germanic, Language Documentation, Sociolinguistics: Hickey (2022)

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Subject: 34.764, Review: Germanic, Language Documentation, Sociolinguistics: Hickey (2022)

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Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:21:20
From: Sabrina Link [sabrina.link1 at web.de]
Subject: English in the German-Speaking World

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-3200.html

EDITOR: Raymond  Hickey
TITLE: English in the German-Speaking World
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Sabrina Link, University of Urbino

SUMMARY

In the introductory chapter, “English in the German-Speaking World: The Nature
and Scale of Language Influence”, the editor provides a short overview of the
topic and introduces some of the issues discussed in the volume, such as
‘German English’, language contact between German and English in the presence
and past, different domains of English as well as English and German beyond
Germany. 
The first thematic section, “The Status of English”, is opened by Chapter 2,
“English in the German-Speaking World: An Inevitable Presence”. The author,
Christian Mair, argues that the presence of English in German is inevitable
due to its role as a world language. Based on the ‘World Language System’ (de
Swaan 2002, 2010) Mair explains the relation between English and German and
gives examples for the hierarchical order between them, e.g., the number of
translations to and from the respective languages and the number of English
and German learners. He argues that the adaption of English in German also
includes non-standard language and that the interaction between the two
languages goes beyond borrowing and code-switching, making English a source
for transidiomatic practices. The chapter concludes with an outline of English
and German as academic languages over the past 100 years, implying that a
shift in the ‘World Academic Language System’ has taken place. 

In Chapter 3, “English in Germany and the European Context”, Sandra Mollin
examines the function of English and English competence in European countries,
tackling the question whether Germany and the Netherlands are in the process
of moving from the ‘Expanding Circle’ to the ‘Outer Circle’ (Kachru 1985),
from EFL to ESL (Quirk et al. 1972). By using data from the Special
Eurobarometer 386 (2012) and by contrasting the two countries regarding the
usage of English in different domains such as education, administration,
media, science, and business, she concludes that the Netherlands are on the
verge between ESL and EFL, while English in Germany does not go beyond the
function of a lingua franca implying that Germany remains in the Expanding
Circle. Mollin closes the chapter by raising the point that, while she has
treated Germany and the Netherlands as uniform entities, also certain
socioeconomic, demographic and regional trends can be attested and need to be
considered. 

In the last chapter of the subsection, “English in the Former German
Democratic Republic”, Göran Wolf introduces the possibility that there was not
only English in the GDR but also GDR English. After giving some details and
examples about English in the GDR, Wolf provides the first ever description of
GDR English based on a currently unpublished corpus consisting of various song
recordings. He describes phonological features, and stress patterns, as well
as a few grammatical and lexical observations. While many characteristics can
be traced back to English-German interference, he argues that the data also
includes features that contrast with interference. Wolf concludes the chapter
by saying that the presence of English in the former GDR was considerable and
postulates the importance of the distinction between English in the GDR and
GDR English.
The second thematic section, “The Transmission of English”, starts off with
Chapter Five, “The History of English Instruction in the German-Speaking
World”, in which Friederike Klippel provides a chronological overview of
English Instruction in German-speaking countries of the last 400 years. For
each of the four periods (before 1700, 1700-1859, 1860-1918, the 20th century)
she provides insight into the motivation, purpose, contexts, materials,
methods, teachers and learners of the respective times and shows how and why
English became more and more established as a foreign language amongst adult
learners and in schools and universities, and how the attitude towards English
differed in various periods, as well as how the approaches and methods of
teaching English changed over the centuries.
Sabine Doff gives in Chapter Six, “English Language (Teacher) Education in
Germany after 1945”, a chronological account of the institutionalisation of
foreign language education starting off with the 1970s and 1980s, when the
field of “learning and teaching foreign languages” expanded, new related
disciplines developed, a trend towards pluralism of methods can be seen and
when English language education became more and more professionalised by the
establishment of professorships, the increased number of doctorates in the
field and the foundation of an official representation (Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Fremdsprachenforschung). A section about the 1990s and 2000s indicates how
the field saw another expansion following the German reunification and which
thematic strands, such as The Common European Framework, Content and Language
Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Language Learner Autonomy, are currently
debated. 

Chapter Seven (“Supporting English Medium Instruction at German Institutions
of Higher Education”) concludes the second subsection of the volume. Susanne
Göpferich, Ina Alexandra Machura and Janine T. Murphy present the current
situation of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in Germany. After a short
overview of the development of EMI in Germany, the authors give examples of
studies that show that the assumption that students and teachers should be
able to make an automatic switch from L1 to the Language of Learning and
Teaching (LoLT) is not a given (cf. Vinke et al. 1998: 387-388; Lasagabaster
2017: 16-17). Hence, the authors investigated in a survey to what extent EMI
teachers receive support from their respective institutions. They found that
support is generally low, and most respondents would be keen to get more
support, especially through courses for the use of English as a language of
teaching and for English-for-Specific-Purposes. To tackle the lack of support,
the authors postulate an integrated approach to EMI training and its
implementation through collaborative support as well as the development of a
policy across Institutions of Higher Education in Germany.
The third part of the book, “Domains and Features of English”, is introduced
by Theresa Heyd’s and Britta Schneider’s Chapter “Anglophone Practices in
Berlin: From Historical Evidence to Transnational Communities”. After a short
discussion about the outdatedness of the ‘three circle model’ (cf. Kachru
1985) and the set of problems concerning the sociolinguistic concept of
communities, they give a short historic overview of current anglophone Berlin,
explaining the beginnings of the multicultural society in Berlin as well as
the development of the role of English and establish four groups of agents
that contribute to the anglophone practice in Berlin: German native speakers,
tourists, global expat community and more precarious immigrants, workers and
refugees. By using two examples, the New African Diaspora and the Third Wave
Coffee Culture, the authors give detailed information about the respective
communities and the role of English. Based on the examples they argue that the
understanding of the linguistic term communities as well as the idea of social
ties needs to be reframed.  

Chapter Nine “English in the German-Speaking World: Immigration and
Integration” by Janet M. Fuller explores the role of English in the
integration of immigrants into German society and its function in relations to
other (immigrant) languages. By discussing the ideas of language ideologies,
national belonging and the imagined community as well as certain linguistics
phenomena in the context of English and integration, the chapter indicates the
special role of English in contrast to other immigrant languages. While mixing
languages between English and German can commonly be found in slogans and
business names, mixing with other immigrant languages is often stigmatised.
Further, whereas a certain level of English proficiency is considered as part
of being German (Erling 2007) and is thus required for the integration into
German society, the acceptance of other immigrant languages is often
restricted to certain domains or contexts. The author therefore concludes that
different immigrant languages serve different functions, especially in slogans
and names. 

In Chapter Ten, “Process of Language Contact in English Influence on German”,
Alexander Onysko introduces a “cognitive grounded model that provides a
theoretical foundation for the different manifestations of English contact
influence on German” (p.202). Before introducing the model, the author gives a
summary of previous research on contact-induced influence of English on German
and a chronological summary of the history of anglicism research and
developments in the language contact theory. Following this, the cognitive
model of language contact types and their language-systemic descriptions
(Onysko 2019) is introduced, contributing to the discussion of how English
influence on German can be understood in contact linguistic terms. The model
outlines four basic types of language contact phenomena and each process is
then matched with six major instantiations of English contact influence on
German. By doing so, “a tight connection between the different types of
anglicisms, their cognitive bases and their language-systemic descriptions”
(p.202) is established. 

Chapter 11, “Persistent Features in the English of German Speakers” by the
editor of the book himself, Raymond Hickey, poses the question whether the
persistence of certain pronunciation patterns of second-language German
speakers of English can be regarded as a second-language variety in its own
right: ‘German English’. After a short overview of code-switching and
loanwords, the English teaching traditions in Germany, the role of orthography
and its interplay with pronunciation, Hickey gives, based on the Essen Corpus
of English Pronunciation, a comprehensive overview of the phonemic inventory,
phonological features, and stress patterns in English and German. He focuses
on the differences and similarities between the two languages and elaborates
how certain persistent features in the English spoken by German natives can be
explained. This leads him to the conclusion that, while certain features are
widespread and persistent amongst German natives speaking English, there is no
so called ‘German English’ due to a lack of social agreement as to which
features should define this variety and due to the fact that most Germans aim
to speak English as spoken in anglophone countries, not as a non-native
variety of English.

The penultimate chapter of the third subsection of the book, “Compiling a
Speech Corpus of German English: Rhoticity and the BATH Vowel” by Sandra
Jansen and Christian Langstrof investigates the adherence of German native
speakers to English native speaker patterns by looking into the use of
rhoticity and the BATH vowel. The Paderborn Archive of German Learner English
(PAGLE), a corpus that is currently being compiled, forms the basis for the
analysis. In the first part of the chapter the authors briefly outline the
PAGLE project. This is followed by an introduction of the two phonological
variables in question (rhoticity and the BATH vowel) and the methodology used
for the analysis. Amongst other outcomes the authors report that, while German
English speakers use variants of British English (BrE) and American English
(AmE), BrE is generally favoured, and that variation is not random but
structured. 
Chapter 13 concludes the third subsection of the book. In “A Question of
Direction: German Influence on English” Julia Landmann discusses German
borrowings into English. Giving a summary of previous research, the author
shows that there is a lack of recent publications and of “an exhaustive
analysis of the entire body of words and meanings which entered English in the
last few decades” (p. 252). The chapter considers the different subject areas
from which many 20ths century German borrowings derive and investigates the
stylistic uses. Data from the OED, English corpora and the database LexisNexis
serve as the basis for the presentation and elaboration of a list of
pragmatic-contextual usages (represented by eight main subject fields) of the
most common German borrowings of the 20th century. This is followed by an
overview of the stylistic functions of recent borrowings from German, such as
local colour, precision, tone, vividness, and variation of expression, each
being accompanied by examples. 
The fourth and final thematic subsection of the book, “Beyond Germany”, is
introduced by Alison Edwards’ and Robert Fuchs’ chapter “Varieties of English
in the Netherlands and Germany”. The chapter’s focus lies on investigating
attitudes towards non-native varieties of English. After a presentation of
previous research in different European countries, the authors introduce their
study, which aims to explore the degree of acceptance of national,
endonormative varieties of English in Germany and the Netherlands. The outcome
of the study strongly suggests that attitude is the key factor when it comes
to acceptance of national varieties, overriding socioeconomic factors such as
age, sex, and region. The comparison between the countries suggests a higher
acceptance of national varieties of English amongst German speakers and shows
that positive attitudes and higher English proficiency condition lower
acceptance and openness towards national endonormative varieties of English.
This goes hand in hand with the fact that Dutch speakers reported higher
proficiency in English than German speakers. 

In Chapter 15, “English in Austria: Policies and Practices”, Ute Smit and
Marlene Schwarz explore the situation of English in Austria by looking into
the use of English in the public and private sphere as well as in Austrian
schools. To describe the use of English in the public sphere the authors zoom
in on the linguistic landscape and Austrian newspapers, finding that English
is not only the most frequently used and most prominent language after German
in the public sphere and that bilingual signs predominantly combine German and
English but also that English has gained a multi-layered importance in
Austria, giving it an important, sometimes even semi-official role. In the
school setting, German still depicts the default language of schooling on all
age levels making Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) a rare
occurrence. Whereas the private sphere is hard to assess, various studies with
children, teenagers and young adults show that English plays an important role
in their daily lives. 
Looking more closely at Austria’s neighbour, Simone Pfenninger and Richard
Watts investigate “English in Switzerland” in Chapter 16. The focus lies on
investigating the discourses on teaching English in Switzerland. After a brief
discussion of theoretical terms from discourse analysis, two core statements
(Nyffenegger 2003) to be discussed in the chapter are identified. Following
this, the authors explain the model of early learning in Swiss elementary
schools and give a brief account of the current situation of English teaching
in Swiss schools in general. Before going on tackling the myth of ‘the
earlier, the better’, Pfenninger and Watts present the key findings of
empirical age research on additional language learning, showing a trend
towards researchers seeing age as a very complex factor with a distinction
that must be made between naturalistic and instructed language acquisition.
The authors further explain how the myth of ‘the earlier, the better’ does
prevail in the Swiss language education context even though there is no, or
only little, scientific support for this claim. 
Moving away from Europe, Chapter 17, “English and German in Namibia”, by Sarah
Buschfeld and Anne Schröder presents the situation of English and German in
the former German colony. The chapter gives a short overview of Namibia’s
history, socio-political and the sociolinguistic developments as well as
current realities. The authors explain the rise of German in Namibia during
colonial times, the different sectors it was used in and its current role in
the linguistic landscape and for the identities of young matrilectal speakers
of German. Further the role and development of English and its interplay with
German is outlined. Following the theoretical and census-based description of
the situation in Namibia, some data from a questionnaire study on language use
and attitude are presented, showing that English becomes more and more
important, especially in public domains but also in private interactions.
Afrikaans, having been the former lingua franca of the country, still plays an
important role in Namibian society, whereas German is often restricted to
speakers of German descent and faces an uncertain future.
The last two chapters of the edited volume take the reader across the pond.
Chapter 18, “English in German-Speaking Wisconsin and the Aftermath” by Joseph
Salmons and Miranda E. Wilkerson describes the dynamic contact setting in
Wisconsin, where, within roughly one hundred years, German-speaking
communities turned into English-speaking communities with remaining German
influence. The chapter outlines the sociolinguistic setting of Eastern
Wisconsin as a German-speaking area in which some German immigrants remained
monolingual for generations. Following this, various lexical and grammatical
effects of contact as well as changes in contact effects over time are
elaborated, showing that some features can still be found in Wisconsin speech.
The chapter concludes with an overview of the attitude of speakers and
non-speakers (measured through sociolinguistic interviews), the current
linguistic landscape and the role of German within the education system, which
all hints towards a continuing presence of German in today’s Wisconsin.
 “The English ‘Infusion’ in Pennsylvania German” by Mark L. Louden marks the
final chapter of the book. Following a brief general introduction into
Pennsylvanian German, the author shows the influence of English on
Pennsylvania German in two subsections. The first section focuses on lexical
borrowings, providing a comparison of two short texts from the 1880s and two
contemporary texts to give an account of the frequency of TIONEnglish
borrowings in Pennsylvania German. The second subsection describes the
structural integration of English loanwords into Pennsylvania German,
examining phonology, morphology, and syntax, indicating, for instance, that
‘older’ loanwords tend to be fully phonologically integrated in contrast to
more recent borrowings. However, all loanwords are subject to the native rules
of inflectional morphology of Pennsylvania German. 

EVALUATION

The preface of the book states that the “volume has resulted from an attempt
to describe the various aspects of the English language in the German-speaking
world” (p. xxi) and that it aims to “[offer] insights into an intricate and
multifaceted subject” (p. xxi). Indeed, the book succeeds in giving a
comprehensive overview and illuminating a wide range of aspects of English in
the German-speaking world. Various facets are discussed in detail, such as the
tradition of English teaching in the German-speaking context, different
domains and features of English as well as the impact on English on varieties
spoken outside of Germany.
The volume is clearly structured due to the division into four thematic
subsections. While some chapters require a certain familiarity e.g., with
phonology (cf. Chapters 4, 11 & 12), psycholinguistics (Chapter 10) or
statistics (cf. Chapters 12 & 14), most chapters provide understandable
definitions of linguistic terminology and are therefore suitable, not only 
for academic, but also interested non-academic, readers. The book progresses 
through the history and presence of English in the German-speaking world,
giving insights into diachronic and synchronic aspects and provides the reader
with an historic account as well as a presentation of recently gathered data,
partially even from corpora that are just being compiled. Due to this and the
fact that the different chapters discuss diverse topics from several
linguistic fields, the volume offers a varied reading experience. Especially
the last subsection, “Beyond Germany”, presents data about German-speaking
countries and communities that are often neglected because of the focus on
Germany. While it is clear that the sheer number of German-speaking
communities in Europe and the world makes it impossible for the book to
dedicate a chapter to each of them, it could be interesting to devote an
entire book to English in (smaller) German-speaking communities outside of
Germany, either within Europe or worldwide. 
A minor point of criticism, and due to the great number of contributors rather
understandable, is a partial lack of cohesion. Chapter 3, albeit mentioning
that the model has attracted criticism, makes use of Kachru’s model in order
to discuss whether Germany moved from the expanding to the outer circle (p.32
ff.). This slightly conflicts with Chapter 8 that attributes a certain
outdatedness to Kachru’s model (p.145). Further, the conclusion of Chapter 3,
namely that English still ‘only’ functions as a lingua franca in Germany
considering that “only 56% of Germans consider themselves to be fluent enough
to conduct a conversation in English” (p. 37) is supported by the findings in
Chapter 7 that also in higher education and in English-Medium Instruction
(EMI) a simple switch from German to English cannot be taken as a given,
neither with regard to students nor teachers. This, however, is contrasted by
the claim in Chapter 9 that English “is also widely spoken by everyone […] –
German citizens with and without migration background” (p. 165-6) in Germany,
giving the impression that most Germans have a high proficiency in English. 
In sum, the edited volume “English in the German-Speaking World” gives a
clear, understandable, and multifaceted account of different aspects of the
topic, shedding light on many different angles and perspectives and can
therefore be seen as a valuable contribution to studying the role of English
in the German-speaking world. 

REFERENCES

De Swaan, Abram. 2002. The World Language System: A Political Sociology and
Political Economy of Language. Cambridge: Polity.
De Swaan, Abram. 2010. ‘Language Systems’. In: Nikolas Coupland (ed.) The
Handbook of Language and Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 56-76.
Erling, Elisabeth J. 2007. ‘Local identities, global connections: Affinities
to English among students at the Freie Universität Berlin’. World Englishes
26(2): 111-30
Kachru, Braj B. 1985. ‘Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism:
The English language in the Outer Circle’. In: Randolph Quirk and Henry
Widdowson (eds.) English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and
Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 11-30.
Lasagabaster, David. 2017. ‘Integrating content and foreign language learning:
What do CLIL students believe?’ Journal of Immersion and Content-Based
Language Education 5(1): 4-29.
Nyffenegger, Susanne. 2003. Reactions to the spread of English in Switzerland:
An analysis based on letters to the editor. MA thesis. Department of English,
University of Bern.
Onysko, Alexander. 2019. ‘Reconceptualizing language contact phenomena as
cognitive processes.’ In Eline Zenner, Esme Winter-Froemel and Ad Backus
(eds.) Cognitive Contact Linguistics. Berlin and New Yor: De Gruyter. 23-50.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1972. A
Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman.
Special Eurobarometer 386. 2012. Brussels: Commission of the European
Communities. https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/s1049_77_1_ebs386?locale=en
Vinke, Adriana, Joke Snippe and Wim Jochems. 1998. ‘English-medium content
courses in non-English higher education: A study of lecturer experiences and
teaching behaviours.’ Teaching in Higher Education 3(3): 383-94


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sabrina Link has been a German lecturer at the Università degli Studi di
Urbino Carlo Bo since October 2021. Before that she worked as a German
lecturer (DAAD Lektorin) at the University of Aberdeen from 2016-2021.
<br />
<br />After studying German and English linguistics, literature, and didactics
(Gymnasiallehramt) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich she
completed a PhD in English linguistics, in which she empirically investigated
English and German neologisms. Her research interests range from lexicology,
contrastive linguistics and pragmatics to language acquisition, gender studies
and didactics of German as a foreign language.





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