English in Europe post-Brexit: An analysis of the post-Brexit discourse surrounding English as a European lingua franca

Sammanfattning: This essay examines in what ways the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union negatively affects the status of English as a lingua franca in Europe, if at all. I theorize that English will continue to play a major part in the lives of regular Europeans in the future, but that politicians and other public figures in Europe may push for a change in language policy and language planning in order to further their own language. In order to test this hypothesis, material is collected from the Retriever Media Archive and from LUBsearch, and is analyzed through content analysis as well as, to a lesser degree, critical discourse analysis. While generalizations are difficult to make from a study such as this, results indicate that there is no concrete support for the idea that Brexit will contribute to a decline of the English language in the EU. However, the status of English and other languages appears to be used as a bargaining tool within the discourse, which brings the politicization of languages into the forefront of the post-Brexit discourse.