Self-mention in research sections of university websites in Estonia and the United Kingdom

Abstract

This article presents a study that investigates how self-mention is represented in research sections of university websites in Estonia and the United Kingdom (the UK), respectively. The study is embedded in the view of the English language as the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles (Kachru 1985). It is hypothesised that there would be quantitative differences in the use of self-mention in the research sections of university websites depending on whether or not they are associated with the Expanding Circle (e.g., Estonia) or the Inner Circle of English (e.g., the UK). The corpus of the study is comprised of research sections of the official websites of the University of Cambridge (the UK) and the University of Tartu (Estonia). The results of the quantitative analysis reveal that the most frequent self-mention per 1000 words is the pronoun “we” on the university websites in Estonia and the UK alike. These findings are further presented and discussed in detail in the article.