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The majority of studies examining English in Germany have been rather narrow in focus, addressing largely the phenomenon of Anglicisms in the German language. In the late 1980s, however, scholars began looking beyond Anglicisms to consider the broader topic of the English language in the German context. This paper presents a qualitative, macrosociolinguistic profile of English in the largest of the German-speaking countries, and also Europe's most powerful economy, the Federal Republic of Germany. Utilizing Kachru's world Englishes model as a theoretical framework, this study examines the following issues for a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of English in Germany today: the history of contact, the functional range of English, and the attitudes associated with the language.

:  Although there is extensive research on Anglicisms in the German language (e.g. Carstensen, 1965; Carstensen, Busse & Schmude, 1993–6; Fink, 1970, 1980, 1995; Görlach, 2002), few studies look beyond lexical borrowing and structural impact to consider other aspects and dimensions of English–German contact in the Federal Republic of Germany. This qualitative study addresses this need in part by examining the role of English in the domain of education. The analysis focuses first on the impact of English in German primary and secondary schooling, where in recent decades English has become the most widely taught foreign language by a considerable margin. The second half of the discussion examines the area of higher education, in which policy efforts on both the European and national level to internationalize the curriculum have led to the introduction of an important new function for English as a medium of instruction (MOI). This development is significant, for it marks government support for the institutionalization of the language within the German context and provides further evidence for the growing bilingualism in the country, with English increasingly functioning as an L2 (Hilgendorf, 2001).

Following on Susan Ridder's article ‘English in Dutch’ (ET44, Oct 95) and Pieter Loonen's and Ross Smith's articles on English in the European Union (ET46, Apr 96), a detailed survey of the effect in recent years of English on German and the Germans

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