The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post-war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio-political discourses as well as in long-term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the sociopolitical changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio-political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded.
This paper sets out to focus the “linguistic construction of publics” (Gal & Woolard, 2014 [2001]: 1) in a sense of the word that is often excluded from sociolinguistic discussion of linguistic action in the public sphere: it discusses how the public is constructed as an indexical (‘auratic’) arena, and a field for positioning, in sociolinguistic research. The paper attempts to point out how the public is (and has been for a long time), on the one hand, envisaged as a sort of counter‐field for academic linguistics (associated with “threatening” metalinguistic practices such as prescriptivism; Cameron, 1995: 5) and thereby juxtaposed to linguistics itself as an allegedly separate field of action, and on the other hand as that appealing place of ‘authentic’ linguistic practice (‘the field,’ ‘the real world,’ etc.) socially oriented linguists ultimately want to explore. The notions of wild publics and creativity are discussed as cases in point.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.