36.2882, Confs: World Englishes on the Stage and Screen (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2882. Fri Sep 26 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2882, Confs: World Englishes on the Stage and Screen (Germany)

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Date: 25-Sep-2025
From: Johanna Gerwin & Valentin Werner [valentin.werner at uni-bamberg.de]
Subject: World Englishes on the Stage and Screen


World Englishes on the Stage and Screen
Short Title: WESS

Date: 28-Sep-2026 - 29-Sep-2026
Location: Kiel, Germany
Contact: Johanna Gerwin
Contact Email: gerwin at anglistik.uni-kiel.de

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Submission Deadline: 03-Oct-2025

This symposium aims at bringing together researchers working on World
Englishes (especially those focusing on varieties of English other
than the “inner circle” varieties of the British Isles and North
America) in staged and mediatized performances. While it cannot be
said that such a perspective has hitherto been ignored in linguistic
research (see Lee & Kachru 2006; Moody 2021), it is evident that pop
cultural artifacts serving entertainment and recreational purposes,
such as films and TV series, (mediatized) comedy, and music, are
dominated by Anglo-American speakers, their accents, and an
Anglo-American gaze (Werner 2018: 6).
However, staged and mediatized performances can also become a unique
medium for putting World Englishes “on display” and enregistering
them, that is, disseminating their language shibboleths and
indexically linked social meanings and characterological figures to a
large audience (Bell & Gibson 2011). By means of their playful,
non-literal, and possibly humorous approach, they also serve to foil
entrenched (language) ideologies associated with standard and
traditional varieties of English and thus tensions between
exonormative and endonormative orientations (see, e.g., Gerwin 2024;
Moody 2025). Relevant performances further add to the global
dissemination, diversification, and recontextualisation of
post-colonial and non-native English varieties (Westphal 2018;
Westphal & Jansen 2021) and serve to highlight phenomena related to
multilingualism (see Buschfeld et al. 2023: ch. 8).
Given this potential as well as the constantly evolving nature of pop
culture and its digital production and distribution, this symposium is
intended to showcase state-of-the-art work that fruitfully combines
perspectives from World Englishes and Pop Cultural Linguistics (Werner
2022). It welcomes contributions that analyze recent pop cultural
performances, for instance by actors, musicians, and comedians, which
are increasingly (also) disseminated via short videos on social media
platforms, and thus have emerged as a novel data base for the analysis
of the enregisterment, stylisation, and metalinguistic discussion of
World Englishes and related topics, such as multilingual performance
and the discursive construction of identities.
We are aiming for a diverse group of speakers, including those with
first-hand knowledge of a World English variety and culture, and
welcome all kinds of suitable (empirical) approaches (stylistics,
sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, register
studies, etc.).
Please send your abstracts (including a title and references) before 3
October 2025.
References:
Bell, Allan & Andy Gibson. 2011. Staging language: An introduction to
the sociolinguistics of performance. Journal of Sociolinguistics
15(5). 555–572.
Buschfeld, Sarah, Patricia Ronan & Manuela Vida-Mannl. 2023.
Multilingualism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gerwin, Johanna. 2024. The role of dialect in comedy performances:
Focus on enregisterment and humor. English Language and Linguistics
28(4). 751–773.
Lee, Jamie Shinhee & Yamuna Kachru (eds.). 2006. Symposium on World
Englishes and Pop Culture. Special Issue of World Englishes 25(2).
Moody, Andrew. 2021. The Englishes of popular culture. In Andy
Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 523–542.
London: Routledge.
Moody, Andrew. 2025. Popular culture and World Englishes. In Kingsley
Bolton (ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes.
Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Werner, Valentin. 2018. Linguistics and pop culture: Setting the
scene(s). In Valentin Werner (ed.), The Language of Pop Culture, 3–26.
London: Routledge.
Werner, Valentin. 2022. Pop cultural linguistics. In Mark Aronoff
(ed.), The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Westphal, Michael. 2018. Pop culture and the globalization of
non-standard varieties of English. In Valentin Werner (ed.), The
Language of Pop Culture, 95–115. London: Routledge.
Westphal, Michael & Lisa Jansen. 2021. English in global pop music. In
Theresa Heyd & Britta Schneider (eds.), Bloomsbury World Englishes -
Vol.1: Paradigms, 357–391. London: Bloomsbury.



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