The language and discourse(s) of footba...

In 2010, the communication scientists Meân and Halone introduced their collection of papers on “Situating Sport, Language, and Culture as a Site for Intellectual Discussion” in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology by claiming that “(t)he articles in this special issue provide an opportunity to illustrate how the domain of ‘sport, language, and culture’ can become a burgeoning site for future intellectual discussion”. The collection of papers in this thematic issue aims to advance this intellectual discussion by presenting up-to-date research on the intricate relatedness of sport, language, and culture. In particular, it further deepens our understanding of the prominent role that language and discursive practices play in a domain that is still often associated primarily with physical activities.

While there is by now a sizable scholarly literature on the various linguistic aspects of sports, these publications often originate in discourse and communication studies, thereby setting a different focus (e.g. the Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication or the Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media). In contrast, this thematic issue brings together cutting-edge linguistic research based on theories and models that focus on formal, functional, social-constructivist, interactional and applied aspects of language and discourse in the domain of football. For such linguistic research it is paramount to work with and analyse authentic, i.e. contextualized language data as can most recently be found in the collection edited by Caldwell et al. While the latter covers a range of different sports, the present thematic issue zooms in exclusively on football as the major spectator sport in Europe and South America that has in recent years also gained popularity in the UAE, Asia and the USA.

Football has witnessed a continuously growing popularity and intensive coverage in various kinds of traditional and new media, and besides the traditional association between football and men, female football has most recently gained impressive grounds as the media attention and spectator numbers in the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Championship in England and the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand impressively illustrate. Playing football no longer automatically means football played by men. While football’s increased popularization and public attention has also led to more research on football across various fields and disciplines such as sports psychology, sociology of sports and educational sciences/sports pedagogy, linguistic research on football is still a relatively recent academic (sub)field. Findings are scattered across various publication outlets, with only few thematically focused collections existing to date. So far, no linguistic journal or book series is dedicated solely to this type of sport. To conclude, in the spirit of Lavric and colleagues’ pioneering volume, the present collection of international papers sets out to continue to “illustrate the richness of linguistic analysis in connection with football”.

When approached from a linguistic angle, research on football can assume various perspectives: According to Billings, one can study how football is enacted, how it is (re-)produced, how it is consumed and organized. Besides these adopted perspectives, the many protagonists of the game such as players, coaches, fans, officials, referees, journalists, commentators, investors etc. and their communication, both in its forms and functions, can be at the centre of linguistic attention. All of these perspectives presuppose language and discourse(s) that can be investigated from various linguistic branches using different data sets and applying different, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research designs. At the centre of such linguistic research, we find lexical phenomena such as naming practices of football stadia, pragmatic phenomena such as wordplay and humour in TV interviews or football reports, but also interactional phenomena such as talk in football audiences or various forms of fan communication. Social phenomena related to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race in football (discourses) are also (socio-)linguistically analysed. Other research is dedicated to specific text types or genres such as post-match interviews or live-text commentary.

Generally speaking, linguistic research has become more diverse and interdisciplinary with an increasing number of studies looking at football language from a more varied methodological perspective addressing a broad range of yet under-researched contexts. At the same time, the emergence of new genres of sports reporting and possibilities for social interaction in the age of online computer-mediated communication and social media has opened up many new and innovative ways of studying the language and discourse of football and its accompanying audio-visual modes from a multimodal linguistic perspective.