Events

In preparation for the upcoming BAELc12, we held a small poster workshop. This way, the students can start preparing their posters for the conference and get feedback. While this is intended for the Intercultural Communication class from Winter 22/23, everyone was warmly welcome. The workshop took place in between classes on Thursday, June 22nd, between 12 pm (c.t.) and 14pm, in Room D of the main building.

This workshop aimed to explore the intricate relationship between language use, societal roles, and the processes of democratization in various contexts. The workshop is part of the project "(Ent)Demokratisierung und Machtstrukturen" and took place on 12 September 2023 in seminar room 6, Rabinstraße 8, University of Bonn, in a hybrid format. Researchers from different parts of the world joined us to discuss different themes in the context of democratization.

The 12th iteration of the BAEL conference took place on Friday, July 7th, and Saturday, July 8th, 2023. The focus of this year’s conference was on Diversity. Papers from all areas of applied linguistics were welcomed, however, with a strong preference for papers with an empirical approach. The conference was open to all who are interested but is aimed specifically at graduate students (M.A. and PhD) and post-docs. Our keynote speakers were Professor Dr. Jo Angouri with a talk on "Multilingualism and diversity in Higher Education: ideals, policy discourse and interactional practice- unpacking the disconnect/s" and Professor Dr. Elizabeth Stokoe with a talk titled "Why categories in social interaction matter, from research to impact".

The paper presented in this talk takes a corpus-based approach to analyze vulgar language in online communication across 20 English-speaking regions based on the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE). The identification of vulgar items combined word lists used in profanity detection with regular expressions to identify a wide range of vulgar elements including spelling variants. The results show a notable trend for inner circle L1-varieties to exhibit higher rates of vulgarity online compared to expanding/outer circle and L2-varieties. The results also show that inner circle varieties have lower type-token rations which indicates that inner circle variety speakers are more creating and rely on a larger repertoire of vulgar elements compared with speakers from other varieties.