English as a lingua franca

10 Key excerpts on "English as a lingua franca"

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  Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures

  • Anna Trosborg(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2. What is “English as a lingua franca”? The concept of a lingua franca in its original sense is very different from the role which the English language is currently playing on the world stage. In its original meaning, a lingua franca – the term comes from Arabic lisan al farang – was simply an intermediary or contact language used, for instance, by speakers of Arabic with travellers from Western Europe. Its meaning was later extended to de-scribe a language of commerce, a rather stable variety with little room for individ-ual variation. This meaning is clearly not applicable to today’s global English, whose major feature is its enormous functional flexibility, and spread across many different linguistic, geographical and cultural areas, as well as its openness to foreign forms. ELF in both international and intra-national cases of communi-cation can best be regarded as a special type of intercultural communication where each combination of interactants, each discourse community, seem to negotiate their own lingua franca use in terms of the use of code-switching and code-mixing, discourse strategies, negotiation of forms and meanings. In its role as an auxiliary language, English can be compared to Latin at the time of the late Roman Empire, or French in the 17 th and 18 th century. When the so-called Western world in the second half of the 20 th century came to depend on border-crossing communication, political, economic and scientific cooperation and supranational organisation, it so happened that English was in the right place at the right time (Crystal 1997). English had already spread into so many ethnically diverse societies, and had already acquired a certain neutrality and cultural dis-tance from its original British culture. It therefore seemed the natural choice for a communication language.

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  Interactions across Englishes

  Linguistic Choices in Local and International Contact Situations

  • Christiane Meierkord(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  12 12 2 From English as a lingua franca to Interactions across Englishes As has been explained in the introductory chapter, the use of English, or any other language for that matter, as a lingua franca is not a new phenom- enon. Languages have been used as lingua francas from when people started to interact with individuals outside of their own speech community, either when they migrated into territories outside of the area inhabited by their speech community, or when they came to trade with individuals not speak- ing their language. One of the first documented languages used for the pur- pose of allowing communication across speakers of different languages was the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin used throughout large parts of the Mediterranean between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. In fact this language provides the origin of the term lingua franca. The use of languages, particularly English, for communication between speakers of different mother tongues has been studied by scholars from vari- ous research paradigms, and section 2. 1 will start out by tracing this research history and positioning IaEs in relation to previous research. Whilst many scholars have based their reasoning on analyses of authentic data, others have approached the topic in a more conceptual manner, leading to a num- ber of myths about communication in English as a lingua franca. Section 2.2 will identify these myths and explain what is wrong with them in light of the realities that have been found to characterise not only the present-day use of languages as lingua francas, but also historical instances of lingua franca communication. The chapter then moves on to describe exactly these real- ities. Section 2. 3 will look at the history of English and at some other lan- guages which have a history of being used as lingua francas.

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  Handbook of Intercultural Communication

  • Helga Kotthoff, Helen Spencer-Oatey, Helga Kotthoff, Helen Spencer-Oatey(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  For example, a Turkish and a Chinese businesswoman may conduct their negotiations in Eng-lish, if neither of them has sufficient command of the other’s mother tongue. This type of lingua franca communication in a natural language has been at the centre of research during the last two decades or so. Largely, however, research has concentrated on the use of English as a lingua franca (see Knapp and Meier-kord 2002, Lesnyák 2004, Pölzl 2003, Seidlhofer 2000, Smit 2003). Lingua franca communication, then, involves the use of a language which most often is the mother tongue of neither of the speakers participating in the in-teraction. But no matter whether its speakers are native or non-native speakers, lingua francas have come – due to increased migration and interlingual relation-ships – to be employed for a variety of functions, which extend well beyond 202 Christiane Meierkord serving for business communication. As Knapp and Meierkord (2002) point out, the different languages used as lingua francas fulfill a range of different func-tions. Some lingua francas serve highly specialized purposes and function only in very restricted contexts such as airtraffic control. However, others are em-ployed for government purposes, as medium of instruction in schools and terti-ary education (Smit 2003) and at universities, and they also play an important role in intimate, personal interactions and as a medium for creative writing. 2.1. Lingua francas for restricted purposes Specific, restricted forms of a number of natural languages have been designed to codify and facilitate communication for specific purposes. Basic English (Ogden 1930) is a simplified form of English, engineered for easy international use. Based on a vocabulary of only 850 items and a few straightforward gram-matical rules, it a presents an attempt to provide people with an international second language which will take as little of their time as possible to learn.

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  English as a Scientific and Research Language

  Debates and Discourses

  • Ramón Plo Alastrué, Carmen Pérez-Llantada, Ramón Plo Alastrué, Carmen Pérez-Llantada(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Firth (1996) called “let it pass” principle. It means that they do not disturb the communicative interaction but they use the context to negotiate the meaning of an unintelligible item. The list of pragmatic strategies used by multilingual speakers is quite extensive. When English is used as a contact language, multilingual speakers often rely on rephrasing, repetition and overt negotiation. In extreme cases they are even ready to change the topic of a conversation to avoid misunderstanding. Moreover, they are quite creative in overcoming the linguistic barriers, for example, they resort to humour, evoke the shared feelings of non-nativeness and distance themselves from the linguistic norms. At the supra-sentential level multilinguals facilitate communication by resorting to such strategies as:

  –segmentation – using shortened utterances into clausal or phrasal segments which form the basic informational units; –regularization – applying the focused information at the front of the sentence;

  –monitoring their syntax to facilitate intelligibility (cf. Canagarajah 2011 ).

  So, in a multicultural context it is quite reasonable to let multilingual students apply norms typical for English as a lingua franca instead of relying on almost unachievable models of native speakers. So what is “English as a lingua franca”?

  2.1 The linguistic research on English as a lingua franca

  ELF performs the role of a “contact language” between speakers who share a common tongue not a common culture and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication (Firth 1996 : 240). Similarly, Jenkins (2009: 200) defines ELF as “the common language of choice, among speakers who come from different linguacultural backgrounds”. In general, the term “lingua franca” denotes a common language used by people who do not share a mother language. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica

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  The Relocation of English

  Shifting Paradigms in a Global Era

  • M. Saraceni(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  5 English as a lingua franca when our hearts have become one, ... we shall reach a common language with a common script, whilst we shall retain provincial languages for provincial use. —Gandhi 5.1 Introduction As was seen in Chapters 3 and 4, the WE paradigm is concerned with the ways in which English, the former imperial language, has been appropriated and reforged locally in different parts of the world, giving rise to a myriad of Englishes, all distinctive in form but equal in value and dignity. Fundamentally, the WE school of thought seeks to decen- tralise and pluralise the concept ‘English’ and to provide representations of it alternative to the Anglocentric model. Accordingly, WE literature has repeatedly criticised purist positions about English, the argument being that English is not just a British or American language but also an Indian, Ghanaian, Malaysian and so on language. Learners and users of English around the world need not be dependent on exonormative models but should be able to rely on endonormative ones. While WE scholars’ efforts have focussed on the ‘Outer Circle’, a num- ber of researches have in recent years begun to turn their attention to the ‘Expanding Circle’, that is, to those parts of the world where English does not have a postcolonial presence but is used primarily as an international lingua franca (e.g. Jenkins, 2000, 2006a, 2007, 2009; Seidlhofer, 2001, 2006, 2009; Cogo and Dewey, 2006; Kirkpatrick, 2006; Dewey, 2007). 82 English as a lingua franca 83 As Barbara Seidlhofer states, “the term ‘English as a lingua franca’ (ELF) has emerged as a way of referring to communication in English between speakers with different first languages” (2005, p. 339). Thus, English may be used as a lingua franca in the European Parliament, among university exchange students, by tourists and travellers, in inter- national business meetings and in countless other contexts.

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  International Education Exchanges and Intercultural Understanding

  Promoting Peace and Global Relations

  • Julie Mathews-Aydinli(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Second, it questions whether a shared language and an awareness of cul- tural difference is enough to bring about change. In particular, the focus of this chapter has been on the role of English as the shared lingua franca of educational exchanges and the implications this has for our understand- ing of intercultural communication. The links between language learn- ing/use and the development of intercultural communicative competence and ICA were placed as central in developing successful communicative practices for the intercultural communication that occurs in educational exchanges. Connected to this was a recognition of the global role of English generally, and especially in higher education, both in interna- tional universities in Anglophone settings and in non-Anglophone settings through EMI programs. At the same time, in order to avoid the concerns of linguistic and cul- tural homogeneity implied by the title of this chapter, and as argued by Phillipson (1992, 2008), the diverse uses, users and roles of Englishes need to be recognized. Without this, English is likely to represent an imposition and restriction on intercultural communication rather than an intercultural opportunity. This is because users will feel forced to conform to a narrow set of communicative and cultural practices, often Anglophone, rather than being able to construct and represent their own communicative and ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LINGUA FRANCA: LINGUA FRANKENSTEINIA OR... 55 cultural practices. World Englishes and ELF research has demonstrated a great deal of adaptation and creativity in English uses and this needs to be recognized in preparation for educational exchanges. It is not enough to simply provide language lessons and information about the host coun- try.

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  English as a Lingua Franca

  The Pragmatic Perspective

  • Istvan Kecskes(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 The Nature of English as a lingua franca 1.1 Brief history Contact languages used among people who do not share a first language have been around for many centuries. In different periods of time, for instance, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Portuguese, and several other languages have performed this function (see Ostler 2005). Several scholars (e.g., Graddol 1997; Phillipson 1998) agree that English has been serving as a lingua franca as a result of colonization from the late sixteenth century. However, nobody mentions another very important reason – at least in my opinion – why English has become the lingua franca of the world. I think it is mainly because the English language unites the two major branches of the Indo-European language family – Germanic (both North and West Germanic) and Neo-Latin – which has created a unique structure and vocabulary that cannot be compared to any other language in terms of diversity of origins. Let me quote here James D. Nicoll (1990: 22), who wrote the following epigram on the English language: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.” 1 Of course Nicoll exaggerates quite a bit but there is some truth in what he says. English as a Germanic language has a grammar and core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. According to estimates, the core vocabulary deriving from Germanic languages is about 26–29 percent, while the Greek- Latin word stock is 64–66 percent (see entries in Wikipedia, and Corson 1995). This has a profound effect both on language acquisition and language use, which is rarely taken into account by language teachers and researchers. Words of Germanic origin constitute the bulk of the vocabulary in everyday conversa- tion (see Jackson 2013).

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  Ontologies of English

  Conceptualising the Language for Learning, Teaching, and Assessment

  • Christopher J. Hall, Rachel Wicaksono(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  (2014). English as a lingua franca. In A. Kunnan, ed., The Companion to Language Assessment (pp. 1607–1616). Malden, MA: John Wiley. Kalocsai, K. (2014). Communities of Practice and English as a lingua franca: A Study of Erasmus Students in a Central-European Context. Berlin: DeGruy- ter Mouton. Kirkpatrick, A. (2011). English as an Asian lingua franca and the multilingual model of ELT. Language Teaching, 44(2), 212–224. Kirkpatrick, A. (2017). Language education policy among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). European Journal of Language Policy, 9 (1), 7–25. Kramsch, C. (2009). The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (2011). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching, 44(3), 354–367. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012). Language Teacher Education for a Global Society: A Modular Model for Knowing, Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing. Abingdon and Oxon: Routledge. Leung, C. (2005). Convivial communication: Recontextualizing communicative competence. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 15(2), 121–144. Li, Wei and Zhu Hua. (2013). Translanguaging identities and ideologies: Creating transnational space through flexible multilingual practices amongst Chinese university students in the UK. Applied Linguistics, 34(5), 516–535. Liu, H. (2016). Language policy and practice in a Chinese junior high school from global Englishes perspective. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southampton. McNamara, T. (2014). 30 years on – Evolution or revolution? Language Assess- ment Quarterly, 11(2), 226–232. Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. and Otsuji, E. (2015). Metrolingualism: Language in the City. Abingdon: Routledge. Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edin- burgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pitzl, M. (2018). Transient international groups (TIGs): Exploring the group and development dimension of ELF.

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  English as a Lingua Franca in Higher Education

  A Longitudinal Study of Classroom Discourse

  • Ute Smit(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The first and less contentious one is already implied in the label itself, English used as a lingua franca, i.e. it is concerned with how the language functions in interaction. Already more than twenty years, ago, Samarin (1987: 371) stated that “[i]t is on the basis of function alone that a language is considered to be a lingua franca [. . . ]”. Practically all recent publications subscribe to language usage as basic criterion (e.g. Firth 1996; Gnutzmann 2005; House 1999, 2003a; Kachru 1996; Rubdy and Saraceni 2006), but – and this is where the potential controversy starts – some proposals for ELF seem to imply a wider, more diversified view of the status of ELF, extending its specificities to the structural level as well. While remaining careful not to jump to unfounded conclusions, there is a clear tendency in ELF research to “striv[e] to adduce empirical evidence for the existence of structural commonalities characterizing the LF in its various manifestations.” (James 2005: 133) What makes such proposals specifically noteworthy is that they have been formulated by leading ELF scholars, such as Jennifer Jenkins, Anna Mauranen and Barbara Seidlhofer. In extending Bamgbose’s (1998) call for codification for World Englishes, Seidlhofer (2001: 150) 60 2 Conceptual considerations propose[s . . . ] to explore the possibility of a codification of ELF with a conceiv-able ultimate objective of making it a feasible, acceptable and respected alternative to ENL in appropriate contexts of use. 25 While she admits freely that this is a long-term goal, codification clearly aims at more than exclusively language usage; it also presupposes linguistic features that can be codified because they form “distinct linguistic sub-systems for the different linguistic levels” (Gnutzmann 2005: 112).

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  Explorations in Pragmatics

  Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects

  • Istvan Kecskes, Laurence R. Horn(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The book argues that it is an inevitable trend in the use of global English that fewer interactions now involve a native speaker, and that as the English-speaking world becomes less formal, and more democratic, the myth of a standard language becomes more difficult to maintain. Graddol claims that in this new world the presence of native speakers hinders rather than supports communication. In organizations 192 Istvan Kecskes where English has become the corporate language, meetings sometimes go more smoothly when no native speakers are present. Globally, the same kind of thing may be happening on a larger scale. Understanding how non-native speakers use English talking to other non-native speakers has now become an important research area. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) project, led by Barbara Seidlhofer, is creating a computer corpus of lingua franca interactions, which is intended to help linguists understand ELF better. Although several studies have been published on the use of ELF (e.g., House 2002, 2003; Meierkord 1998, 2000; Knapp and Meierkord 2002; Firth 1996; Seidlhofer 2004), our knowledge about this particular variety of English is still quite limited. What makes lingua franca communication unique is that interlocutors usually speak different first languages and belong to different cultures but use a common language that has its own socio-cultural background and preferred ways of saying things. So it is essential to ask two questions: 1. With no native speakers participating in the language game how much will the players stick to the original rules of the game? 2. Can current pragmatic theories explain this type of communication in which basic concepts such as common ground, mutual knowledge, cooperation, and relevance gain new meaning? Second language researchers have worked out several different tools and methods to measure language proficiency and fluency.

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