English ‘on top’: discourse functions of English resources in the German mediascape

Abstract

This paper responds to what I perceive as a lack of a meso level framework in the study of English in the mediascapes of the ‘expanding circle’. I shall make my case on the example of German. Traditionally, most research on German/English language contact is on Anglicisms, that is, lexical borrowings from English. Other approaches do exist, but Anglicisms research, which originated in the 1960s, still seems the dominant framework and, as most of this work is carried out on mass (mostly printed) media data, it has also become the dominant way of looking at English in the media. I argue in this paper that the Anglicisms paradigm does not account for a range of patterns of national language/English contact. As an alternative, I propose an approach labeled ‘English on top’, which focuses on the textual positions and discourse functions of English rather than its lexical structure. In a preliminary working definition, ‘English on top’ is a pattern of bilingual discourse in which English is a complementary code used in addition to (‘on top’ of) the predominant national language for specific discourse functions. As the discussion shall make clear, it is not the case that the usage patterns this metaphor aims at capturing have never been noticed before, but it does seem they haven’t been systematically considered so far.