Socio-cultural impact on language change (SILC)
Can democratization explain recent language change?
Since around 1960, numerous changes have occurred in Western societies: More rights for women, flatter hierarchies in the workplace, and more attention paid to the inclusion of minorities, to name just a few. These changes have in common that they pay greater attention to equal rights and flatter power structures, a development also known as democratization. What does this mean for language use, however? For instance, are people nowadays less likely to emphasize their position of power when speaking to a subordinate than they were 30 or 50 years ago? And if so, is this related to the ongoing process of democratization in our society?
These are some of the questions the SILC project wants to answer. Although a lot of previous research, for example on the use of address terms and modal verbs, has uncovered changes during the past decades, no study has systematically linked these recent changes with sociocultural processes such as democratization and individualization. We want to close this research gap by not only gathering language data from corpora and discourse completion tasks (DCTs), but also by finding out more about people's attitudes towards social hierarchies and concepts such as authority in questionnaires and interviews. We then want to search for correlations between the attitudinal and the language data.
The project focuses on recent language change in different varieties of English and German, namely British and American English as well as German spoken in Germany and Austria. This allows us to compare the developments in different countries and cultures, and see which impact the language we speak has compared to the influence of the culture we come from. Data will be collected from informants of various age groups, representing different generations, to uncover change with the help of synchronic data. This approach has been called ‚apparent time studies’ and has been widely used in sociolinguistics, but never – to our mind – with the aim to uncover recent change with the help of a combination of discourse completion tasks, attitude questionnaires, and interviews.
The project Socio-Cultural Impact on Language Change is a part of the interdisciplinary project Demokratisierung und Machtstrukturen.
Publications
Terms of address: A contrastive investigation of ongoing changes in British, American and Indian English and in German.
Bruns, Hanna, & Kranich, Svenja (2021)
Journal of Contrastive Pragmatics, 3(1), 112-143.
Requests across varieties and cultures: Norms are changing (but not everywhere in the same way)
Kranich, Svenja, Bruns, Hanna, & Hampel, Elisabeth (2021)
Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 32(1), 91-114.
Changes in the modal domain in different varieties of English as potential effects of democratization.
Kranich, Svenja., Hampel, Elisabeth, & Bruns, Hanna (2020)
Language Sciences, 79, 1–15.
Presentations
Project members:
Former members
Elisabeth Hampel
Sarah Lapacz
Check out our other research projects!
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We examine the issue of language use in communicating one’s queer identity on different (online) platforms.
Democratization and Power Structures
The project examines in an interdisciplinary way how societies in the 21st century negotiate social, political, cultural, and economic power structures.