Anatol Stefanowitsch

Die Autor*innen nehmen in unterschiedlichen Themenbereichen teils semantische, teils pragmatische Perspektiven auf Tabus ein: Sie betrachten die Aushandlung von Tabugrenzen und das Spiel an den Gr [...]

Linguistisch-begründete Sprachkritik macht gesellschaftliche Strukturen sichtbar und begleitet deren Wandel kritisch. Formate wie das „Unwort des Jahres“ zeigen dieses Potenzial, zumeist bleibt linguistisch fundierte Sprachkritik in öffen [...]

Language regularly becomes the subject of public debate — examples from recent decades include discussions about spelling reform, loan words (especially from English) into German, the requirement to speak German in school playgrounds, traditional names for ethnic groups, and linguistic gender equality. There are at least three reasons why linguistically based language criticism receives little attention in these debates, which I will examine in this article: first, those involved in these debates, whether as debaters or as audience members, lack the linguistic knowledge to actually understand and evaluate such positions; second, the state of research within linguistics does not always correspond to what would be necessary to formulate such positions, or it is not sufficiently known within linguistics; third, linguists who participate in such debates often behave naively towards the ideological aspects involved. Linguistics as a field should strive to overcome these obstacles in order to be able to participate more actively in public debate.