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“50 Years of English Linguistics in Germany”: An Introduction

This year’s linguistics special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik departs from convention in not offering the usual collection of academic papers focussed on a shared topic, but four interviews with senior colleagues who have shaped the field in important ways. In other words, it is a small step towards an oral history of English linguistics in Germany or – to be precise – the Germanspeaking academic community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It complements the growing body of publications on the history of Anglistik / Amerikanistik (English and American Studies),1 and it adds the personal perspectives of leading participants in the events and activities recorded. This is a kind of subjectivity which I consider permissible even in scholarly and academic discourse and which I have frequently found quite rewarding. For example, even the reader familiar with the research and publications of David Crystal, M. A. K. Halliday, Geoffrey Leech or John Wells will be enlightened by their “personal histories”, which – alongside those of several other prominent British colleagues – were published by the Philological Society (Brown and Law, eds. 2002). For some years now, the form of the interview, rather than the personal history, has been used to great profit for similar purposes by the editors of the Journal of English Linguistics, who have recruited William Labov (2006), Elizabeth Traugott (2007), Walt Wolfram (2008), Richard Bailey (2009), Robin Lakoff (2010), Terttu Nevalainen (2011), Geneva Smitherman (2012) and Doug Biber (2013) as interviewees. It was with such examples in mind that I decided to approach senior German (-speaking) colleagues to invite them to come together for a similar venture. The four people interviewed – Hans-Jürgen Diller, Udo Fries, Manfred Görlach,