German Linguistics at the UDE deals with a broad and diverse spectrum of subject areas and questions in research and teaching. The focus is on sociolinguistics (language variation, language attitudes and multilingualism research), linguistic pragmatics (e.g. prosody research, teaching communication, language of mathematics, language of politics), media linguistics (research into internet-based communication), corpus and computer linguistics. Additionally, it involves the profile focus "Contemporary Societies" and in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Integration and Migration Research (InZentIM) at the UDE, where, among other things, the 3. Ruhr Centre for Multilingualism (RZM), where linguists and language teaching researchers from the UDE and the RUB work on multilingualism research from various perspectives - sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, system linguistic - and organise annual lecture series. In 2018, German Linguistics played a leading role in organising the anniversary congress of the society of applied linguistics (GAL e.V.).

In various project contexts, Duisburg-Essen linguists are involved in the development and expansion of digital research infrastructures and digital language resources, which are also systematically used in teaching. Examples of projects in this area are the database for mobile messenger communication MoCoDa2 , the image database of the "Metropolenzeichen" project, the Bonn Early Modern High German corpus and the Wortschatzwissen.de project. With the Linguistics Server Essen (LINSE), Duisburg-Essen Linguistics has also been operating an information server since 1995 with one of the world's largest collections of links to German linguistics.

Every semester, the lecture series "Colloquium Linguistics and Language Didactics " takes place at the UDE, in which guests and teachers of the department present topics of current linguistic research. Linguistics is integrated into the university's digitisation strategy through various projects on research and teaching with digital resources and on the linguistic analysis of communicative practices in social media. Through the Centre for Edition and Edition Technology (AEET), it cooperates with German Medieval Studies in the areas of historical linguistics and editioning.

German language didactics deals with language acquisition and mediation processes in German lessons and other contexts of language learning, for example in peer and family interactions. At the UDE, it encompasses the entire spectrum of subject didactic research and teaching from primary school through secondary school to university. Specific focal points of language didactic research are the acquisition and teaching of oral and written skills (discourse and textual competence), research into and professionalisation of teachers of instructional communication, and the development and testing of digital resources and media didactic concepts for teaching German.

Language didactic research at the UDE is empirically oriented and therefore closely linked to the practice of teaching German and cooperation with schools. In the project "Sprint - Sprachbildung interaktiv" (Sprint - interactive language education), a training concept for teachers' conversational and discourse support skills is being designed and evaluated as part of a school development project. Within the framework of a fellowship of the Stifterverband, concepts of digitally supported learning are tested in the school concept, documented, and processed into learning modules for teacher training. In addition, the department for Language Didactics is involved in the founding of an inclusive university school and the further development of teacher training in cooperation with the Centre for Teacher Training at the UDE. Here, the topics of "inclusion" and "education in the digital world" are the main focus, among others within the framework of the university-wide project "Professionalisation for Diversity (ProViel) ", the joint project "Communities of Practice NRW for Innovative Teacher Education (COMeIN) " and the interdisciplinary working group "Digitisation in Teacher Education (DidL) ".