ABSTRACT
Criticizing the language of newspapers and reporters has a long standing tradition, which reaches back to the seventeenth century when matters of style, correctness and purity were censured, and continues down to today’s Leserbriefe complaining about violations of communicative principles (see Bucher 1986). Nevertheless, such criticism has not restricted the role of newspapers in linguistic development. For many people reading the newspaper provides the most important (and sometimes only) regular touchstone to the standard written language, which in turn means that newspapers play a key role in the diffusion of linguistic standards and, above all, of vocabulary items. Due to their wide range of coverage, newspapers are also an important ‘mirror’ of linguistic developments in a number of fields, especially in public affairs, administration, politics, culture, economics, sports, etc. It follows, however, that there is no such thing as a unified German newspaper language. In terms of subject matter, style, syntactic structures, vocabulary and textual organization, the degree of variation between different newspapers, newspaper types and even editing desks and genres within one and the same newspaper is very broad indeed. One only needs to compare, for instance, the syntactic complexity of the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit to the daily tabloid Bild , language use in the sports section to that of the Feuilleton, and the styles of news reporting and feature writing, to gain a sense of the marked linguistic contrasts transmitted by newspapers.
