Saturday, November 29, 2025 | 9.00 – 17:00 
Saturday, December 13, 2025 | 9.00 – 17:00 
Saturday, December 20, 2025 | 9.00 – 17:00 
Wienand Building, Auerbach Library, Weyertal 59, 3rd Floor

Language is not only a tool for communication but also a powerful social force that shapes and reflects identities, relationships, and ideologies. Sociolinguistics explores the intricate connections between language and society, investigating how social factors influence language use and how language, in turn, shapes social structures. This seminar invites participants to engage with methods and case studies in sociolinguistics, highlighting its relevance to contemporary environmental issues and climate discourses.

As the theoretical and methodological foundation of the seminar, we will explore cultural and sociolinguistic approaches while integrating language-critical ecolinguistic perspectives. The seminar’s medial domain of research extends to advertising and corporate communication (Stibbe 2023), social media (Schwegler, Landschoff & Rommel 2023), newspaper discourse, IPCC reports, and speeches by climate activists (Penz 2021), as well as publicly used (multimodal) metaphors (Dancygier 2023; Zurro 2024). Finally, we will discuss approaches from sociolinguistics and eco-critical language awareness (eco-CLA) against the backdrop of English Language Teaching (ELT) (Micalay-Hurtado & Poole 2022).

In the second half of the course, students will work in groups to apply eco- and sociolinguistic approaches to multimodal texts in the field of eco-discourses – such as public climate change and sustainability communication, climate activism, or green advertising. Depending on the groups’ linguistic interests, analytical foci may include semantics, pragmatics, or cross-cutting approaches, for example, multimodal image-text analysis or the study of rhetorical strategies.

Further information for students of the University of Cologne: Klips