9
Mark Richard Lauersdorf
University of Kentucky, USA
Monika Kavalir
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Introduction: English in Central Europe1
With its international prominence in today’s world, English is in contact (to greater or lesser 
degrees) with most languages and societies around the globe. The results of that contact vary 
from location to location, depending on both the linguistic and the socio-cultural factors of 
the particular local context. This special issue of ELOPE focuses on the presence of English 
specifically in Central Europe and its interaction with the languages and societies of the 
region.
English began its global spread in the 18th century with the rise of the British Empire and 
its colonization practices, where English was the language of power and opportunity in the 
colonies. The rise of English to the status of a truly international language began after the 
Second World War, in part due to the influence of the economically powerful USA. But what 
is perhaps surprising is how quickly English has spread around the world to date (McKenzie 
2010, 1). The majority of English speakers today learned English as a second language – the 
ratio of speakers of English as a first language to non-first language speakers is estimated to 
be 1:3 (Peterson 2020, xvi). 
In continental Europe, English is now widely used in private and public life and education, 
and is therefore, in many locations, more an additional language than a foreign language 
(Phillipson 2007, 124). Contributing to this status are the facts that: English has become 
the most widely taught foreign language in the world (Peterson 2020, 131); it is currently 
the most widely used language on the internet (Jeon, Jullien, and Klimenko 2021); and it is 
highly dominant in the music and entertainment industry (Hjarvard 2004, 86). In Europe, 
pupils start learning English at school mostly between the ages of 6 and 12 (Peterson 2020, 
4). English was the most widely spoken foreign language in 19 of the 25 EU countries 
surveyed in 2012 that did not have it as an official language. As many as 67% of Europeans 
considered English to be one of the most useful languages, and 79% saw English as the most 
useful language for their children’s future (European Commission 2012, 5–7, 21, 69, 80).
This special issue seeks to provide a series of vignettes of the role, status, and influence of 
English in Central Europe. We readily acknowledge that Central Europe is a concept that is 
difficult to pin down geographically, socially, and politically, since it is in some cases defined by 
historical roots (despite differences in 20th-century social and political developments; see, for 
example, Becker and Wheatley 2021; Caragliu 2022), while other conceptualizations build 
specifically on more recent commonalities of experience (in the last 50–100 years; see, for 
example, Berend 1996; Labov 2019). At the same time the concept persists precisely because 
1 We gratefully acknowledge the textual and bibliographical contributions of Ina Poteko to paragraphs two and three 
of this introduction.
INTRODUCTION
2022, Vol. 19 (2), 9-11(228)
journals.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.19.2.9-11
10 Mark Richard Lauersdorf, Monika Kavalir Introduction: English in Central Europe
it is a useful one, in that it captures an area with some common socio-cultural traditions that 
in many ways create a recognizable milieu and a feeling of familiarity.
The contributions to this special issue on “English in Central Europe” span the present-
day geo-political space of Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria; and 
they cover a disciplinary span from phonetics to discourse, and from linguistic landscapes to 
experimental psycholinguistics. What is common across this geographical and disciplinary 
variety and scope is a focus on the effects of English in contact with local languages and in the 
context of local cultures. This special issue brings together research that includes the history 
of English language use in local contexts; variation and change in linguistic structures of 
local languages induced by contact with English; English in competition with local languages 
across societal domains of use; societal reception of the use of English in local contexts; as well 
as acquisition of English conditioned by local L1s, which can perhaps be seen as resulting in 
contact varieties of English developed through contact with local languages.
The papers are organized according to the language(s) with which English is in contact. 
Nada Šabec guides us through the linguistic landscape of Maribor, Slovenia, drawing our 
attention to the increasing presence of English in Slovene public signage and the potential 
legal and societal ramifications of that phenomenon. Monika Kavalir and Ina Poteko report 
on a large-scale survey of the attitudes and practices of Ljubljana university students toward 
the significant presence of English across many facets of their daily lives in Slovenia. Adela 
Böhmerová assembles a diverse array of scattered historical information to weave together the 
story of the earliest contacts of Slovak speakers with English, taking us from Slovakia to the 
United States and back again. Martin Ološtiak and Soňa Rešovská then demonstrate some 
of the present-day outcomes of English-Slovak language contact, giving a thorough linguistic 
description of the borrowed lexicon of English words in the most recent 30 years of Slovak 
language development and change. The effects of English on present-day Polish are the focus 
of Magdalena Smoleń-Wawrzusiszyn’s examination of dominant English discourse practices 
in the societally influential world of capitalist marketing. Markéta Malá, Gabriela Brůhová, 
and Kateřina Vašků then turn to the field of economics to investigate the acquisition of 
international English academic writing conventions in the use of reporting verbs by Czech 
university students. Continuing in the field of language acquisition, Eva Maria Luef, Pia 
Resnik, and Tomáš Gráf deploy psycholinguistic experimentation to study the learning of 
new phonetic detail in English by Czech and Austrian university students. And last, but 
certainly not least, Jiřina Dunková and Veronika Quinn Novotná offer a plaidoyer for a more 
extensive and inclusive view of the world of literary production in English in the teaching of 
English as a Second Language in the Czech Republic (and beyond).
The range and variety of the work in this volume provide strong evidence of the significant 
presence of English in the social and linguistic fabric of the Central European region, and also 
evidence of the vibrant community of researchers investigating that presence of English in 
the region. We are grateful to the authors for their dedicated work on the articles that appear 
in this special issue, and we would like to thank the following scholars who contributed to 
the volume by reviewing manuscripts: Kozma Ahačič, Jason Blake, Gregor Chudoba, Biljana 
Čubrović, Markus Giger, Adam Jaworski, Helen Kelly-Holmes, Vesna Lazović, Christina 
Mark Richard Lauersdorf, 
Monika Kavalir
Introduction: 
English in Central 
Europe
11INTRODUCTION
Manouilidou, Robert McKenzie, Sonja Novak Lukanovič, Antonio Ostarić, Mariana 
Pascual, Jasna Potočnik Topler, Tvrtko Prćić, Veronika Rot Gabrovec, Anna Ruskan, Eva 
Sicherl, Sonja Starc, Andrej Stopar, Nada Šabec, Branka Živković, as well as one reviewer who 
chose to remain anonymous. We are also grateful to the editors of ELOPE for accepting our 
special issue proposal for publication as volume 19.2, and especially to the technical editor, 
Andrej Stopar, for his patience, diligence, and expertise in shepherding the issue through the 
production process.
References
Becker, Peter, and Natasha Wheatley. 2021. Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former 
Habsburg Lands. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198854685.001 
.0001.
Berend, Ivan. 1996. Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery. 
New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Caragliu, Andrea. 2022. “Better Together: Untapped Potentials in Central Europe.” Papers in Regional 
Science 101 (5): 1051–85.
European Commission. 2012. Europeans and Their Languages: Report. Accessed December 19, 2022. 
https://op .europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/f551bd64-8615-4781-9be1-c592217dad83.
Hjarvard, Stig. 2004. “The Globalization of Language. How the Media Contribute to the Spread of 
English and the Emergence of Medialects.” Nordicom Review 25 (1–2): 75–98.
Jeon, Doh-Shin, Bruno Jullien, and Mikhail Klimenko. 2021. “Language, Internet and 
Platform Competition.” Journal of International Economics 131: 103439–67. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2021.103439. 
Labov, Jessie. 2019. Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture Beyond the 
Nation. Budapest: Central European University Press.
McKenzie, Robert M. 2010. The Social Psychology of English as a Global Language: Attitudes, Awareness and 
Identity in the Japanese Context. Berlin: Springer.
Peterson, Elizabeth. 2020. Making Sense of “Bad English”: An Introduction to Language Attitudes and 
Ideologies. London: Routledge.
Phillipson, Robert. 2007. “English, No Longer a Foreign Language in Europe?” In International Handbook 
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