Variation in World Englishes (S, Lange, WiSe 2025/2026)

Prof. Dr. Claudia Lange

Seminar, Mi (3), W48/001

Harry Potter and his friends eat sweets in the British edition but candy in the American edition of their adventures: you have probably learned about differences in pronunciation and vocabulary concerning these two varieties of English, but what about English in Australia, Sri Lanka, or Nigeria? Over the last years, major research projects have been devoted to taking stock of the range of variation found in World Englishes. The course will tackle topics such as verb complementation, negation, definiteness, discourse markers, speech acts and politeness from a comparative perspective. One prominent aspect of this course will be an introduction to corpus linguistic methods and to the International Corpus of English (ICE) project, which provides the basis for much current research on World Englishes. This course is mainly research-oriented, i.e. students should be prepared to do a lot of reading and to undertake original research. You are encouraged to check out this introductory text in advance: Lange, Claudia & Leuckert, Sven (2020), Corpus linguistics for World Englishes: A Guide for Research. London: Taylor and Francis (available as an ebook via the SLUB).