Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Bernd Kortmann

University of Freiburg
English Language and Linguistics

Rector’s Fellow
April 2024 – July 2024

E-Mail: bernd.kortmann@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

Last Update: 31.08.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Bernd Kortmann is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His publications include four monographs, 17 edited volumes and special issues, the two-volume multimedia reference work A Handbook of Varieties of English(2004), one print atlas on grammatical variation in the Anglophone world (2012), the open access electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (www.ewave-atlas.org; version 3.0 published 2020), and about 100 research articles and reviews in journals and collective volumes. He has published widely in English and areal European linguistics. His main research interest is the comparative grammar of non-standard varieties of English around the world, especially from a typological perspective. He is co-editor of Topics in English Linguistics and Dialects of English and a journal editor of English Language and Linguistics.He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Eastern Finland and is an elected member of the Academia Europaea. In June 2023, he took office as President of ISLE, the International Society for the Linguistics of English. Find out more about his research from his homepage, ResearchGate or Academia.edu.

Selected Publications

Kortmann, B./G. G. Schulze, eds. 2024. Mehr Mut wagen! Plädoyer für eine aktive Politik und Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript.
Kortmann, B./K. Lunkenheimer/K. Ehret, eds. 2020. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English 3.0. [eWAVE 3.0]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. <http://ewave-atlas.org>
Kortmann, B./K. Lunkenheimer, eds. 2012. The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Kortmann, B./J. van der Auwera, eds. 2011. The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kortmann, B./Edgar Schneider in collab. with Kate Burridge/Raj Mesthrie/Clive Upton, eds. 2004. A Handbook of Varieties of English. 2 vols + 1 CD-ROM. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kortmann, B. 1997. Adverbial Subordination. A Typology and History of Adverbial Subordinators Based on European Languages. (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

FRIAS Project

The Spread of World Languages

My 4-month fellowship at FRIAS will primarily be devoted to a 1,000+ page handbook on the spread of world languages that I am co-editing, to be published in 2025. Above all, this will involve the authoring of the chapter on English (with approximately 2 billion speakers the most widely spoken of all world languages) and, together with my co-editors, of a substantial general introduction to the topic, as well as the close reading and commenting on about a third of the overall 40 chapters of the handbook. In defining what a world language is, the team of editors decided not to go by a single hard-and-fast criterion, even if the total number of (native and non-native) speakers and geographical spread clearly are major criteria. There will be chapters on about 30 languages (including a chapter on Esperanto), one third of which are “world languages” of the past. In the handbook a diverse range of factors will be explored (structural-typological, sociolinguistic, political, historical, sociological, cultural, religious, economic, educational, etc.) which are responsible for or at least facilitating, partly also following from, the global spread of languages beyond their traditional mother tongue homelands. Throughout the chapters, what will also be discussed will be common effects on the nature and structure of these world languages caused by their wide geographical reach, diversity of speaker communities, and the manifold language contact situations they find or found themselves in.