German in the world - historical and contemporary perspectives

The course is sociolinguistically oriented and treats the present-day and historical position of the German language in different parts of the world. You study and apply linguistic theories of multilingualism, minority languages, language contact and language policy both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. The course starts with an overview of the geographic dispersion of the German language in different periods and a discussion of theoretical and methodological issues. The course then has two thematic centres of gravity: First, the emphasis is on the geographic area where German is a majority language (i.e. present-day Germany, Austria and Switzerland). In case studies, we study the relation between different German varieties in society and the influence of other languages both in earlier language periods and today. The other theme is German as a minority language in different parts of the world both in the past and today. We discuss language-political questions in relation to different situations with language contact.