English Linguistics is concerned with the analysis of the English language system as a whole, comprising first of all the core areas of linguistics. Furthermore, it deals with the distribution of English (social and regional varieties), its historical development (diachronic linguistics), and its uses in everyday life (pragmatics, text and discourse linguistics).

In research, we specialise in the fields below. Together we cover a wide area of English linguistics and, because we have some overlapping interests, we can offer an in-depth view of a range of topics from multiple perspectives.

• Varieties including older and newer varieties as well second-language varieties world-wide, which we study from a historical, geographical and social perspective. We look at, among others, the pathways which language change can take, the interaction of other cultures and the English language, as well as the manner in which social behaviour and attitudes affect the way people use English. Contemporary models of sociolinguistics provide the framework for this research. 
• Does growing older change the way we speak and which impact do changes in our social environments have on our linguistic patterns? These are some of the central research questions we explore in the study of language change across the lifespan. Spoiler alert: Yes, the way we speak changes when we grow older! (Buchstaller)
• Researching language in use, such as describing the general principles governing speaker’s linguistic choices or showing how situational/institutional requirements shape texts, is the field of pragmatics and discourse linguistics. Our interests here include identity construction and personalisation, multimodality, figurative language, and the emergence of pragmatic features in various media and genres. (Bös)
• We believe in the importance of using authentic data. Besides using various empirical approaches, all of us have also been active in corpus linguistics, both using and constructing corpora (large collections of electronic text).