The Position of the German Language in the World

Ulrich Ammon was Professor of German Linguistics with Sociolinguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He taught at universities all over the world, including: The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA; in Australia at the University of Sydney, Australian National University in Canberra; in Japan at Dokkyo University, Soka; and in Austria at Vienna University. Ammon was a member of several scientific organisations and was President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (GAL) from 2003–2006. He was involved in many third-party projects funded by the German Research Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the European Union and the German Academic Exchange Service. His main research interests were: sociolinguistics, language policy, international language research, variation linguistics and dialectology.

A. The German Language between National Interests and Global Communication: Terminology and Theory

B. ‘German language’, ‘German-language territory’: what these terms include and exclude, and the question of a German ethnic group

C. Speaker numbers and economic strength of German

D. German as official language of state

E. German as minority language, but not official language of state

F. German in international business communicationG. German for international scientific and academic communication

H. German in Diplomacy and the European Union (EU)

I. German in Media and Language Arts outside the German-Language Territory

J. German as a foreign language (GFL) outside the German official-language territory

K. Policies for promoting the German language in the world