World-building, BATS

It is a key insight of contemporary sociolinguistics that language use not only reflects social realities but also creates them. People use language to construct the worlds in which they live, both in spontaneous everyday interactions and in planned discourse. In this seminar, we will look more closely at planned textual discourses and investigate how new worlds have been invented in the past and are being invented in the present. We will focus on the role of language both as a vehicle of communication and negotiation that is necessary for world-building, and on attitudes toward language(s) that are expressed and exploited in world-building.

We will discuss the role of language(s) in inventing new worlds in three thematic blocks: fantasy and science fiction writing, imagining the past for the construction of contemporary identities, and language use in resistance and decolonisation movements.