Traditional research on anglicisms has been undertaken in different media corpora. However, the media, both agents of globalisation and affected by globalising flows, and how they operate within global flows of messages and linguistic resources that characterise our mediatised societies have not been given sufficient attention in these studies. In addition, the German media have been repeatedly criticised for using anglicisms without explaining these, causing comprehension problems. By examining novel anglicisms on German radio from a journalistic perspective, this article shows that acknowledging journalists’ language practices gives a more detailed picture of the specific language used on air. This article includes an analysis of novel anglicisms in a self-compiled radio corpus and an examination of interview statements made by radio journalists on their use of novel anglicisms in radio content. The findings show that the claim made by previous research is rather oversimplified. Instead, a complex web of normative forces that shape how novel anglicisms are made comprehensible on radio is revealed, which includes the constraints of the medium, stylistic and journalistic genre conventions, the target audience, and the language perceptions of journalists.
Due to increasing mediatisation of societies and the global diffusion of English, previous research has paid a great deal of attention to the use of English in contact with other linguistic resources. Traditionally, the focus in studies on global Englishes is predominantly on verbal resources, which are often examined in media corpora. The recent paradigmatic shift towards a conceptualisation of language as a social practice, however, also acknowledges other resources such as music, images and sounds as part of semiotic assemblages in the process of meaning-making. This paper contributes to this current debate and argues for a more holistic view on language illustrated by examples of the use of global Englishes in German radio media texts. The examples show the complexities of translingual and transmodal practices in mass media communication and how English linguistic resources are deeply entangled with other semiotic resources and thereby locally appropriated in semiotic assemblages to stimulate the listener's visual imagination and achieve communicative success in a non-visual medium.
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.