PERCEPTIONS OF NATIONAL AND REGIONAL STANDARDS OF ADDRESSING IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA

Abstract This article investigates the use of German forms of address in different national and regional varieties of German, as perceived by speakers of those varieties. For particular domains such as the workplace, informants report significant regional and national differences in use not only of pronominal address but also of nominal address and linguistic structures linked to addressing such as greetings. The data also confirm differences in information about and sensitivity for different national varieties between speakers of the dominant and of non-dominant varieties characteristic for asymmetrical pluricentricity

A cross-linguistic comparison of address pronoun use in four European languages: Intralingual and interlingual dimensions

As part of a major ongoing project, we consider and compare contemporary patterns of address pronoun use in four major European languages- French, German, Italian and Swedish. We are specifically interested in two major aspects: intralingual behaviour, that is, within the same language community, and interlingual dimensions of address pronoun use. With respect to the former, we summarize our key findings to date. We then give consideration in a more preliminary fashion to issues and evidence relevant to the latter

German Studies in Australia: A Statistical Overview, 1995 -2010

The new Netzwerk Deutsch survey on German as a Foreign Language world-wide, following two previous surveys, provides a unique (if not entirely complete and comprehensive) overview of the development of the numbers of students of German internationally. This article discusses the numbers indicated for tertiary students of German in Australia and sets them in relation to the world-wide average, as well as to the numbers indicated for the other English-speaking OECD countries. The decline in student numbers has been less dramatic in the Anglophone OECD countries than in the world on average. Australian German Studies programs in particular have proved resilient in the face of the world-wide trend

"For the LOTE was an EBGerP, you see." - A critical appraisal of the curricular framework for teaching and learning German in schools in Victoria, Australia

For a country that still has a rather monolingually anglophone mainstream culture, the efforts that Australia in general, and the State of Victoria in particular have made towards a language policy are truly outstanding -- all the more since the interest in a serious language policy at both the federal and the state levels has only been developing quite recently. Milestones of this development are the 1984 Report on a National Language Policy by the federal Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts, and Joseph Lo Bianco's document, National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco, 1987). Karen Petersen's study Zur Situation des Deutschen als Fremdsprache im multikulturellen Australien: eine Bestandsaufnahme am Beispiel des Bundesstaates Victoria (Petersen, 1993) gives an interesting outsider's view on the development that German as a school subject in Victoria had taken at the time the study was undertaken, in the late eighties and the early nineties.2 Fernandez, Pauwels and Clyne (1994) provide an Australia-wide picture. Comparing these analyses with recent documents on state government policy such as the Languages Other Than English Strategy Plan of 1993 and the Report to the Minister for Education of 1994, both by the Ministerial Advisory Council on Languages other than English (Ministerial Advisory Council, 1993 and 1994), the most recent available edition of the Victorian Certificate of Education Study Design for German (Board of Studies, 1994), the CSF, the Curriculum and Standards Framework Languages Other Than English (Board of Studies, 1995) or the advice brochure for teachers how to implement the CSF, Using the CSF Languages Other Than English (LOTE) (Board of Studies, 1998), one can easily see how far the administrative framework for teaching and learning languages in school has come in the last decade