Speech practices as discursive practices for meaning-making across domains, genres, and social groups is an under-researched, highly complex field of sociolinguistics. This field has gained momentum after innovative studies of adolescents and young adults with mixed ethnic and language backgrounds revealed that they "cross" language and dialectal or vernacular borders to construct their own hybrid discursive identities. The focus in this volume is on the diversity of emerging hybridizing speech practices through contact with English, predominantly in Europe. Contributions to this collected volume originate from the DFG funded conference on language contact in times of globalization (LCTG4) and from members of the editor's funded research group "Discursive Multilingualism".

The fifth volume in the series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe unites a collection of peer-reviewed papers delivered at the Third Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization (LCTG3) at the University of Greifswald in 2011. The papers are arranged in five thematic sections: Part I studies lexical and grammatical borrowing and pseudo-loans. Part II looks at code-switching and language intertwining in different contexts, while Part III is concerned with the power, political backup and use of different languages in multilingual settings. This is followed by Part IV which comprises three articles on the Linguistic Landscapes of different urban areas. Finally, Part V focuses on language choices in literature and institutional settings.

The fourth volume in the series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe features contributions from various philologies in the young but rapidly growing research area of linguistic variability. The book grew out of a nucleus of papers presented at a North German Linguistics Workshop organised by the chair of English Linguistics, and developed into a collection of doctoral and post-doctoral research papers on variability in different domains of language use, variability as conceptual cum linguistic variability, and variability as studied in the mainstream research framework of corpus linguistics. It is the integrative presentation of thematic breadth and pluralistic research methodologies that inspired the title New Approaches to the Study of Linguistic Variability. The volume focuses on sociolinguistic studies of language use as social practice and variability of authentic language use.

User-centred, or Concrete Lexicology of English towards a theory of language proficiency, which is based on studies of lexical problem solving in contexts of real-English as a world language. The theoretical model of language proficiency is situated between the disciplines of psycholinguistics and social systems-theory. It is designed to establish the theoretical foundations for a Concrete Linguistics of Language Usage as a discipline in its own right. The studies on language behaviour focus on creative ad hoc formations and code-mixing in English and the abilities of concrete language-users to make habitual and situative/modificatory use of the lexicon as a system of knowledge and application.

Die sprachwissenschaftlich adäquate Kulturgeschichte europäischer Sprachen muss erst noch geschrieben werden. Ziel des Sammelbandes ist es, Konvergenzen und Divergenzen in und zwischen Sprachen unter der Brückenthematik des Sprachkontakts zu dokumentieren und zu integrieren. Der Fokus auf (lexikalischen) Transfer- und Interferenzprozessen ermöglicht auch eine Neubewertung von kommunikativen Praktiken. Im Spannungsbogen von lokalen (nationalen) europäischen Sprachkulturen und über das Englische als europäischer lingua franca sich ausrichtenden globalen Funktionskulturen entstehen neben Interferenzen zwischen den Sprachen auch Transferenzen in den Identitätsbildungen ihrer Sprecher.