People across the world are using English in their daily lives—but how are they doing this, and why? Our project “Ideologies of English in the Linguistic Landscape” is investigating conflicts between permissive and purist ideologies concerning the use of English in Germany.

Based on both our observations of people’s everyday conversations about language use and our own past research, we have been noticing for a while that German young people have started to take a more easygoing attitude toward the use of English in Germany than their older fellow citizens traditionally have. This suggests that German young people are driving the emergence of a new, more permissive ideology of English that’s been breaking down the language’s traditional associations with the US and the UK — or to put that a different way: it looks like these young people are coming to see English as a culturally neutral language that anyone may use in everyday communication. At the same time, though, the older, more purist ideology that sees English primarily as the “property” of native English speakers (and a tool that should be used by Germans only to communicate with people who don’t speak German) of course still persists.

In our project, we’re studying this language-ideological conflict within the “linguistic landscapes” (or the written language visible in the public spheres) of two mid-sized German cities: Mannheim in the west, and Leipzig in the east. Analyzing linguistic landscapes is a powerful way of exploring the interplay of socio-historical and ideological influences on languages and how these become a part of our everyday environments. And because the conflict between permissive and purist ideologies of English is playing out in a visible way in the German linguistic landscape, our work will be able not just to provide data on how this is playing out in Germany, but also teach us more generally about how ideologies of English can sometimes vary within the same society.

To better understand the ideologies shaping these dynamics, we will be collecting not just linguistic landscape data, but also data from focus groups of young people. This integration of techniques will allow us to trace how participants’ thoughts and feelings about how English should be used relate to how it is actually being used in the linguistic landscape.

Our aim is for our results to inform theories of transnational English, as well as help sociolinguists better understand the link between linguistic landscapes and language ideologies.