“We have a grandios saison gespielt” – English as a lingua franca in media sports interviews

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a study investigating the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in media interviews of a specific kind: the focus is on post-match interviews with football (soccer) players. Professional football with its dynamic and fluctuating transfer market is increasingly internationalised and thoroughly mediatised, frequently requiring athletes and journalists to use English when interacting in front of the camera for the benefit of the media audience. The study is based on a small corpus of videos and transcripts of post-match interviews conducted with German football players in English. It uses a conversation analytic approach to explore the mutual influence of language use and genre characteristics on a structural, linguistic, interactional and media level. Post-match interviews are a dialogic media genre with distinctive features that contribute to the genre’s essential functions of reporting, evaluating and collectivising, and differentiate it from other types of interview such as the political, the news or the expert interview. The paper will illustrate and discuss how communicative, interactional and linguistic strategies are employed by participants to master the challenges of a specific type of ELF institutional, media and professional interaction.