English as a Lingua Franca in Danish Higher Education – a case of sociolinguistic change

Language change has been a key area of interest in sociolinguistics since the foundation of the discipline, and it continues to form a vibrant area of research today. Recently, however, it has been suggested that the sociolinguistic notion of change should be broadened to include phenomena that are not necessarily linguistic as such, but which nevertheless concern reconfigurations of language-society relations, for instance in the shifting language ideological value ascribed to particular language varieties or ways of speaking in the face of sociocultural change. This broader concept of change, which represents an attempt to pursue a critical interest in social change as well as language change, without giving priority to either of the two ‘sides’ of the sociolinguistic endeavour, has been referred to as sociolinguistic change (Coupland 2009, Androutsopoulos 2014, Mortensen, Coupland and Thøgersen 2017). In this talk, I will argue that the development of a wider concept of sociolinguistic change is also of relevance to the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF). In fact, I want to suggest – and illustrate by means of examples taken from research into the internationalization of Danish universities since the late 1990s – that contexts where English is used as a lingua franca offer particularly ripe sites for the study of sociolinguistic change in late modernity, and that the development of a research agenda for ‘ELF and sociolinguistic change’ holds the potential to be of considerable benefit for sociolinguistics and ELF studies alike.

Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2014. Mediatization and sociolinguistic change: Key concepts, research traditions, open issues. In Androutsopoulos (ed.) Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter. 3– 48. 

Coupland, Nikolas. 2009. Dialects, standards and social change. In Marie Maegaard, Frans Gregersen, Pia Quist and Jens Normann Jørgensen (eds.) Language Attitudes, Standardization and Language Change. Oslo: Novus. 27–50. 

Mortensen, Janus, Nikolas Coupland & Jacob Thøgersen. 2017. Conceptualizing style, mediation, and change. In Mortensen, Coupland and Thøgersen (eds.) Style, Mediation, and Change: Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Talking Media. New York: Oxford University Press. 1–24.

Note: This talk is a modified version of a paper first given at ELF and Changing English: 10th Anniversary Conference of English as a Lingua Franca 12-15 June 2017, Helsinki, Finland. (http://www.helsinki.fi/elf10/2017/).