This article explores some dimensions of how the role of the English language in Norway has been discursively constructed in newspapers during recent years, based on the analysis of data from the five-year period 2008-2012. The analysis is conducted using a specialised corpus containing 3,743 newspaper articles which were subjected to corpus-based macro-analyses and techniques, as well as manual micro-level analyses and categorisation. The main focus of the analysis is on the manifestation of attitudes through various ways of expression, such as the occurrence of lexical sequences and conceptual metaphors related to language. The results show that even though positive perceptions of English were quite frequent in the data, the main part consisted of expressions where English is seen in a negative light. Hence, a fairly negative attitude towards the role of English is predominant, as illustrated by the most frequent conceptual metaphor, "language is an invading force," where English is at war with and seen as representing a threat to the Norwegian language.