E-commerce and language choiceProfessor Ingrid Piller Tuesday 9th October 2007 at 11am AbstractIn e-commerce with its potentially global reach targeting an audience is, inter alia, a question of language choice. In this presentation, I will explore language choice in e-commerce on the basis of tourism websites. Based on a theoretical framework informed by the political economy of language choice, I will explore the relationship between the commodification of languages in e-commerce and the global spread of English as well as the valorization of multilingualism. Short resumeIngrid Piller joined the Linguistics Department in April 2007 as Professor of Linguistics. She is also executive director of the Adult Migrant English Program Research Center. Before she came to Macquarie she held the Chair in English Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of English as a Global Language at the University of Basel in Switzerland. She also worked at the University of Sydney, the University of Hamburg, Ithaca College, and Dresden University of Technology. Ingrid’s academic credentials include a ‘habilitation’ in English Linguistics (Regensburg, 2003), a Ph.D. in English Linguistics (Dresden, 1995), and an MA in German Linguistics (Wrzburg, 1992). Additionally, she holds a Teaching Diploma (Bavaria, 1992) as well as a Translator and Interpreter Diploma (Saarland, 1999; NAATI, 2004). Ingrid is an applied sociolinguist whose research interests center around language learning in the context of globalization and migration as well as cross-cultural communication and consumer discourse. |