A Corpus-Based Investigation of the Word Football in Contemporary Spoken English: Linguistic Profile and Cultural Values in 1994 and 2014

The sport of football has played a prominent role in British society since 1863 (Russell 1999).Footnote1 The increasing popularity of this sport has stimulated research focused on the language of football in specialised settings (Levin 2008; Cornelia 2014; Hoffmann 2015; Ebeling 2021).Footnote2 An area that remains open to inquiry is that concerning the way the sport of football has been talked about and represented in conversation over the last decades in the UK.Footnote3 The present study aims to fill this gap and to examine the linguistic profile of the word football in the years between 1994 and 2014. It is a corpus-based investigation that has been undertaken by querying the spoken sections of the BNC corpora. The analysis reveals that there are signs of ongoing change witnessing the reconceptualisation of football which becomes a sport with a pervasive role in society that is especially dominated by a personal and social component.