Chair of Variation Linguistics

The chair of variation linguistics focuses on the following areas:

varieties of English world-wide
sociolinguistics
corpus linguistics
language use in media

Special interests in research and teaching include the following:

English in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia
language contact and contact languages
language attitudes and standardization
language use in news media, in music, and in computer-mediated communication
language and globalization
language in education
style variation
grammatical variation and change
varieties of English in historical perspective

Foto: Vortrag von Dagmar Deuber — Prof. Dr. Dagmar Deuber giving a lecture on our current research
© Centre for English Language Studies – University of Hyderabad

A major ongoing project is the compilation of the Trinidad & Tobago component of the International Corpus of English. We are also compiling and analysing synchronic and diachronic corpora of anglophone Caribbean newspapers.

Foto: Deuber Haensel Wissen Leben — Prof. Dr. Dagmar Deuber (left) and research assistant Eva Hänsel (right) studying a historical issue of the Trinidad Guardian
© Pjer Biederstädt

Source: wissen | leben November 2013 p.2, reproduced by permission of Pjer Biederstädt

Also currently in the focus of our research is spoken English in the contexts of news broadcasts and education in the Caribbean, which is analysed from the dual perspective of language use and language attitudes.