Language Contact and the Future of English

Ian Mackenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138557222
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351366588
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book reflects on the future of the English language as used by native speakers, speakers of nativized New Englishes, and users of English as a lingua franca (ELF). The volume begins by outlining the current position of English in the world and accounts for the differences among native and nativized varieties and ELF usages. It offers a historical perspective on the impact of language contact on English and discusses whether the lexicogrammatical features of New Englishes and ELF are shaped by imperfect learning or deliberate language change. The book also considers the consequences of writing in a second language and questions the extent to which non-native English-speaking academics and researchers should be required to conform to 'Anglo' patterns of text organization and 'English Academic Discourse.' The book then examines the converse effect of English on other languages through bilingualism and translation. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars in English language, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and language policy.

1 Introduction

English Today

This book is about something that no one actually knows anything about: the future of the English language. And like the man said, it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future!¹ But it is of course possible to extrapolate from past and present states of the language and attested sociolinguistic patterns. Historical linguists regularly invoke the uniformitarian principle, according to which natural processes and mechanisms that operated to produce language change in the past are almost certainly also occurring today (Labov 1972: 161; Lass 1997: 28–9). We may also expect them to continue to operate, making the present the key to the future as well as the past. Writing about the future of a language is necessarily highly speculative—although maybe not more speculative, and possibly even less speculative, than some work on a language’s past²—but at least the uniformitarian principle provides a grounding for one’s speculations.

Specifically this book is about whether the kinds of English used by non-native speakers—who greatly outnumber the language’s native speakers—are likely to have an effect on the major varieties of native English, as is widely argued by theorists of English as a lingua franca lingua franca or ELF (e.g. Seidlhofer 2003; Mauranen 2012). Given that the differences between the English spoken by non-native and native users are to a large extent the result of first language (L1) interference—or, stated more neutrally, crosslinguistic interaction—this is a matter of language contact. And where language contact is concerned, I am unfortunately beguiled by Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) bold claim that ‘[a]s far as the strictly linguistic possibilities go, any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language’ (p. 14), overriding any supposed internal structural constraints, because ‘it is the sociolinguistic history of the speakers, and not the structure of their language, that is the primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact’ (p. 35). In this instance it would be the transfer of features from other languages to native English via the intermediary of non-native English. But (my beguilement notwithstanding) I will argue that the overall social context of interaction between non-native and native speakers of English does not favour the transfer of many morphosyntactic, lexical, phonological, or other features.

1.1 Synopsis

In this introductory chapter, which revisits some points from my previous book, English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and Teaching English, I sketch the current role of English in the world, including its use as a native language, as a nativized second language in many multilingual countries (largely former British colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania), and as a lingua franca, or a language of wider communication, in many other parts of the world. I also defend the utility (indeed the reality) of the concept of the native speaker, or more accurately, the concept of native-like competence, defined in terms of a shared knowledge of lexis, phonology, morphology and syntax, and appropriate style shifting—the use of standard and non-standard social and contextual variants in a given speech community (Croft 2000). First and second language acquisition necessarily take place in very different ways, which lead to different ways of using language. This psycholinguistic or cognitive fact in no way diminishes the legitimacy of second language (L2) speakers. Non-native uses of English can be viewed as different from native uses rather than deficient: it is evident that the usages of any given community speaking a native or nativized variety of English are not necessarily appropriate (or even meaningful) in cross-cultural communication using English as a lingua franca.

In Chapter 2 I discuss theories of second language acquisition (SLA), centring on the effects of prior L1 learning on an L2, especially the replication of entrenched L1 constructions. This has been variously described in terms of transfer, interference, interlanguage, fossilization, approximative systems, and so forth. More recent work has shown how the language use of bi- and multilingual speakers always differs from that of monolinguals, while giving a neutral or even a positive account of the effects of crosslinguistic interaction. Such approaches are applicable to the nativized postcolonial ‘New Englishes,’ in which some of the fossilized ‘errors’ of early generations of speakers have developed into stable, conventionalized features of a new variety, and to English used as an international lingua franca, where it makes little sense to describe users as deficient native speakers, as in orthodox SLA theory.

In Chapter 3 I discuss conflicting accounts of language change, including those that attribute it to languages themselves, rather than their speakers, and those that attribute changes to active human agency and, often, the effects of language contact. I argue that adult language users can indeed make conscious and deliberate changes to the way they use a language in pursuit of enhanced expressivity, in an attempt to be optimally comprehensible, and sometimes (although clearly not in the case of ELF) to follow the dictates of prescriptivists. This process is rather more apparent in ELF than in native English, and it appears likely that some ELF users have effected conscious, deliberate changes to native usages for reasons of clarity and communicative effectiveness, choosing to disregard some of the more incongruous and idiosyncratic elements of English lexicogrammar. The aggregate result of such intentional and purposeful choices can indeed be language change.

Chapter 4 offers a historical perspective on the effects of language contact on English, beginning with contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the indigenous British Celtic population and later with Scandinavian invaders. This contact is believed to have had a major impact on English, including both additions to the language and simplifications resulting from imperfect learning by post-adolescents and adults. But although population movements and adult acquisition had major effects on languages in the past, when literacy was limited, today changes are inhibited by education and by print (and its digital successors). I look at the standard models of innovation and diffusion, and the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms—accommodation, expressivity, prestige, and so on—that could lead to (or prevent) common lexicogrammatical features of L2 English being propagated among native English speakers. Of course contact between native and non-native varieties of English is more like dialect contact than ordinary language contact. The influence of other languages only manifests itself via varieties of L2 English, and many of the standard factors of language contact are inapplicable (the extent of bilingualism, diglossia, the societal roles of two different languages, etc.). The only pertinent parameters are duration and intensity of contact and attitudes towards the forms of speech involved.

In Chapter 5 I consider the scope and limitations of potential alternatives to the use of English as the world’s lingua franca, including multilingualism (and consequently interpreting and translation), receptive multilingualism, and codeswitching or language mixing, as well as Mandarin Chinese, which some people consider a candidate for a future worldwide lingua franca.

Chapter 6 turns to academic English. To be widely read, or indeed to be published at all, researchers are increasingly obliged to write in English. But does this require L2 English users to conform to the dominant linear, deductive, ‘Anglo’ pattern of text organization (which can safely be called ‘English Academic Discourse’)? Or should they be free to transfer rhetorical patterns from their L1s—such as inductive and indirect styles of writing and end-weighted forms of argumentation—into articles written in English? Given that most academic writing in English is for an international audience, a strong case can be made for non-native English-speaking researchers (or their English translators)—and indeed native English-speaking writers too—being free to adopt a range of styles, or some sort of heterogeneous hybrid, depending on their perceptions of their readers’ expectations. On the other hand, different languages have different grammatical structures, which result in different discourse patterns, so what seems natural and appropriate in one language is not necessarily so, or necessarily possible, in another. There are always gains and losses involved in writing in different languages, and in translation, as equivalence of meaning is only partial. Writing in another language inevitably changes what one wants to ‘say.’

All round the globe there is a millennia-old history of language contact and bi- or multilingualism leading to lexicogrammatical change, or more specifically, replication, and today in many parts of the world the dominant language providing the model for replication is English. Increasing bilingualism with English, and the crosslinguistic interaction this entails, as well as extensive translation from English, are leading to English having a growing impact on the lexicon, syntax, and discourse structures of many other languages. Although translation can transfer ideas across cultures, and enhance the target language and its literary forms, after a certain point, too many calques of terminology, phraseology, and syntactic patterns can begin to impoverish a borrowing language. A parallel development is that more and more European writers, particularly novelists, appear to be deliberately simplifying their style and avoiding local cultural references to facilitate translation into English, hoping thereby to access the global market. In Chapter 7 I analyze these trends and attempt to relativize the consequences of crosslinguistic interaction with English from a historical perspective. Chapter 8 is a short conclusion.

1.2 Native, Nativized, and Non-Native Englishes

Following Braj Kachru (1985), and despite more than three decades of critiques, it has become conventional to talk about the ‘three circles’ of English. The countries in which the language is used and transmitted to children as the mother tongue of the majority of the population make up the inner circle, while the countries in which English has an institutionalized second language role in a multilingual setting constitute the outer circle. The rest of the world (almost without exceptions), in which English is taught, learnt and used as a foreign (or additional or auxiliary) language, for communication with speakers from all three circles, is the expanding circle (although today expanded would be more accurate). There are approximately 400 million native English speakers and 430 million outer circle L2 speakers (Crystal 2003: 65–7), and probably a billion or more expanding circle speakers of varying levels of proficiency (Crystal 2008). Alternative terms for the inner, outer, and expanding circles are English as a native language (ENL), English as a second language (ESL), and English as a foreign language (EFL) countries.

Kachru’s classification, which is based more on sociopolitical criteria than linguistic ones, is clearly not without its problems, as there are countries that are difficult to place in a particular circle. For example, in South Africa—which Kachru (1992b: 356) simply left out of the country names on his well-known diagram of the different circles—there are native speakers of English but also many non-native ones: as Bruthiaux (2003: 163) points out, it would be more accurate to talk about White South African English, used as an L1, and Black South African English, generally used as an L2. Moreover, about half the native speakers of English speak South African Indian English, ‘a variety that is distinct from both White and Black South African Englishes as well as from mainland Indian varieties.’ Similarly about 20% of Canadians are Francophone, and another 20% have L1s other than English and French, which means that there are also a lot of L2 speakers of English in Canada. There are also differing proportions of speakers of other first languages in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England.

In the multilingual outer circle countries (such as Nigeria, Kenya, India, Singapore, the Philippines, Fiji, etc.), English is largely learned at school; has an official, high-status, second language role; and is often used by an economic elite—in most cases ‘at best between 20% and 30% of the total population’ (Mufwene 2010: 57)—as a lingua franca for intra-national (and often inter-ethnic) communication in politics, administration, education, the media, and so on. For some educated people in these countries, although English is not, chronologically, their first language, is it their primary or dominant language—‘the one they use most, and perhaps are most comfortable and fluent in for many or even most purposes’ (Trudgill 1995: 314). Once upon a time the localized varieties of English spoken in these countries were described as fossilized interlanguages—for example, Selinker (1972: 216) described Indian English as an interlanguage ‘with regard to English’—but they are now more often called New Englishes, a term used in book titles by Pride (1982) and Platt et al. (1984). Kachru (1983) pointed out that so-called ‘New’ Indian English is actually older than Australian English, but I will still use the term New Englishes in preference to Kachru’s preferred term, World Englishes, which logically includes all varieties, including British English, and Schneider’s (2007) term Postcolonial Englishes, which includes American and Australian English, and so on.³

Unlike expanding circle learners, who might only use English in the classroom, and encounter it as a foreign language in the media (in song lyrics, on the Internet, etc.), learners of New Englishes tend to have considerable exposure to the local variety of the language. It is often used in schools as a medium for the teaching of other subjects, and there may be local English-language media (television, radio, newspapers, books, etc.). There will probably be frequent opportunities to acquire and use the language in a variety of situations in everyday life so that local patterns of usage become entrenched in individual speakers’ minds and conventionalized in the community. English may also be used at home in codeswitching or in a diglossic relation with a local language: there are increasing numbers of native English-speaking households in supposedly outer circle Singapore, and to a lesser extent in India, East and West Africa, and elsewhere.⁴

The postcolonial New Englishes are now generally described as being endonormative, which is to say that they have largely stabilized, developed their own local norms, and do not look to an external source of authority (see Hickey 2012). Schneider (2007) proposes a ‘dynamic model’ showing how New Englishes pass through different evolutionary phases. In a grossly simplified version, over the course of time the settlers’ English picks up cultural terms from the local population; increasing numbers of the local population become bilingual with English; the settlers’ ties with the mother country weaken and inter-ethnic contacts increase; the settlers and the indigenous population accommodate to each other’s uses of English, leading to phonological and structural innovations, largely due to transfer from local languages; particularly useful elements are selected from the ‘feature pool’ (Mufwene 2001: 14) of linguistic choices; and eventually a stable, nativized, endogenous variety of English emerges, with characteristic local features of grammar, lexis, and phraseology and a standard and recognizable pronunciation that is transmitted from one generation to the next.⁵ The nativized variety is codified with the writing of dictionaries and grammars, and so on, but in the course of time differentiation may occur, with the birth of regional dialects and ethnic and social varieties. The term ‘nativized’ is important: without it, the children who learn and use English as their first language in multilingual countries like India, Singapore, Nigeria, and so on would have to be described as native speakers of a non-native variety, an obvious terminological absurdity.

Both Kachru’s three circles model and Schneider’s dynamic model largely neglect class differences, and other commentators point out that there is a considerable gap between middle-class varieties of New Englishes and simpler, basilectal varieties spoken in the same countries (Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 36). In fact, many speakers are competent in a ‘slice’ of a continuum running from a Creolistic ‘basilect’ through a number of ‘mesolects’ to a standardized ‘acrolect’ and vary their speech depending on their interlocutors, the formality of the situation, and so on (pp. 39–40).

In the expanding c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: English Today
• 2 Imperfect Learning and Multicompetence
• 3 Purposeful Language Change
• 4 Will English as a Lingua Franca Impact on Native English?
• 5 ELF and the Alternatives
• 6 Academic English, Epistemicide, and Linguistic Relativity
• 7 Bilingualism, Translation, and Anglicization
• 8 Conclusion: Language Contact and the Future of English
• Bibliography
• Index