The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca

Jennifer Jenkins, Will Baker, Martin Dewey, Jennifer Jenkins, Will Baker, Martin Dewey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317509196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive introduction to the main theories, concepts, contexts and applications of this rapidly developing field of study.
Including 47 state-of-the art chapters from leading international scholars, the handbook covers key concepts, regional spread, linguistic features and communication processes, domains and functions, ELF in academia, ELF and pedagogy and future trends.
This handbook is key reading for all those engaged in the study and research of English as a lingua franca and world/global Englishes more broadly, within English language, applied linguistics, and education.

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Part I

Conceptualising and positioning ELF

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1

Conceptualising ELF

Anna Mauranen

Introduction

The two remarkable things about English today are that it has spread around the globe like no other language before, and that it is spoken by people for whom it is a second or additional language more than by those for whom it is a first language. Under either of those conditions, let alone both together, one would expect a language to become unusually heterogeneous and variable. This is exactly what we find with English. It is therefore not surprising that we have long been talking about ‘Englishes’ in the plural in English studies (I alone have four books called World Englishes in my bookshelf – not to speak of volumes on ‘global’ or ‘international’ Englishes). At the same time, the latest wave of globalisation has meant an enormous growth in the volume and kinds of mobility – and thereby in language contact.

In this, too, English leads the way: it stands out from any other language in having become the global default lingua franca. This has inspired studies of language contact and contact languages in the last few years, with English at the centre (e.g. Schreier and Hundt 2013), or as part of a wider multilingual contact environment (e.g. Siemund, Gogolin, Schultz and Davydova 2013).

The significance of ELF transcends the contact of any particular individual or group with English. ELF is not just a contact language where English is a domestic language or otherwise especially salient in a given community, but a non-local lingua franca, the means of communicating between people from anywhere in the world. Neither is its global weight restricted to elite usages in politics, international business or academia, but it is also employed by tourists, migrant workers, asylum seekers and just anyone in their daily lives over digital media. There is not even need to move around physically to be in contact with English.

The term lingua franca is normally used to mean a contact language, that is, a vehicular language between speakers who do not share a first language. While some lingua francas are pidgins or jargons that have no native speakers but arise in contact situations as a mixture of two separate languages, others are existing natural languages used for vehicular purposes. Pidgins typically arise for restricted purposes, but any broad-purpose natural language can be used as a lingua franca if speakers have access to it, with no restriction on the uses or functions it can be put to. Although the term lingua franca is today commonly used for natural languages that are particularly widespread, especially, sometimes even exclusively, English, it is worth keeping in mind that any language, however small, can equally well be used as a lingua franca. Lingua francas need not even be ‘living’ languages: ‘dead’ languages also serve as vehicular languages, usually for a limited range of purposes like religion or learning, as in the cases of classical Arabic or mediaeval Latin.

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Two kinds of widespread definitions of ELF circulate in the field of applied linguistics, one that takes it to apply only to people for whom it is not a first language, to the exclusion of native speakers (e.g. Firth 1996; House 1999), and another that accepts native speakers as part of the mix (e.g. Seidlhofer 2004, 2011; Jenkins 2007; Mauranen 2012). The latter view is adopted here, since a categorical division of speakers into native and non-native has been seriously questioned in ELF, as it has been in World Englishes. The more comprehensive definition also reflects the reality of English today: English is spoken in situations with widely varying combinations of participants, including first-language speakers of different varieties. So briefly, I take English as a lingua franca to mean a contact language between speakers or speaker groups when at least one of them uses it as a second language. This is a short working definition, and will do for the present. A number of things could be further specified, but I hope this chapter will throw light on some of the remaining issues, as other chapters certainly do in this volume.

We can approach ELF from a number of perspectives, but for achieving a holistic notion I suggest a simple division: the macro, the meso and the micro. These perspectives are based on the scale of a social unit, from the largest to the smallest, and like any categorisation, it is an abstraction and inevitably inattentive to much of the rich detail of reality. I nevertheless believe it to be relevant for capturing the big picture.

The division draws on earlier distinctions by scholars dealing with language contact from different traditions. The first is the classic treatise of language contact by Weinreich (1953/1963) who suggested two relevant levels for the occurrence of what he called language transfer: the individual, or the level of speech, and society, or the level of language. A recent psycholinguistic division by Jarvis and Pavlenko (2007) adopts a very similar view, distinguishing the levels of the individual (who shows cross-linguistic influence), and society (where transfer can be observed). In a similar vein, variationist sociolinguists such as Milroy (2002) or Trudgill (1986, 2011) also posit two key levels, the societal and the individual. However, in the sociolinguistic case the individual refers to individuals in interaction, in effect making interaction the other pivotal level. Interaction, that is, the micro-social or meso level is also crucial to many social and linguistic theories: social network theory (Granovetter 1973; Urry 2007) and its applications in language change analysis (Milroy and Milroy 1985; Raumolin-Brunberg 1998); it is also key to language use in conversation analysis, interactional sociology, interactional linguistics and more recently in neurolinguistic approaches (see section ‘ELF from the meso perspective’ below for more detail).

Increasingly in the last decade or so, language has been viewed from Complexity Theoretical perspectives; in these accounts, adaptive, self-organising systems are perceived as emergent at different scales. In these accounts, two levels of language systems are recognised, the individual (idiolects) and the communal language; the crucial relationship between the two is emergence, which results from interactions between speaker idiolects. In brief, then, the present three-perspective approach combines principal elements from previous approaches, and is oriented to variation, change and contact.

In this chapter, I apply the three-pronged approach, and look at the consequences of each on the concept of ELF. At the end, I take up some integrative issues that cut across all three perspectives, which would be awkward to discuss separately at every point.

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ELF from the macro perspective

A macro-social perspective on English as a lingua franca involves two central domains: the linguistic and the societal. Let us begin from the linguistic, since language is our main focus. The scale of communication and mobility in the contemporary world, and as I will argue, the complexity of language contact involving English, affect our perceptions of language deeply. The sheer amount of contact is unprecedented, since in principle speakers of any of the roughly 7,000 recognised languages of the world can be in some kind of contact with English. But it is the quality of contact that is even more interesting than the quantity.

ELF bears certain recognisable affinities with dialect contact; both incorporate contact between speakers of mutually intelligible varieties. The term ‘variety’ has been problematised with regard to ELF both from outside, usually arguing it does not fulfil all requisite criteria to pass as a variety, and from the inside (e.g. Seidlhofer 2007; Jenkins 2015) for implying a settled, unified language form, complete with a speech community, that can be reliably described. While I would be inclined to apply the term more loosely, in analogy with its counterpart at lower level analysis, ‘variant’, have settled for the more neutral term ‘lect’. Lect coheres with sociolect, idiolect, etc., and is thus productive in a positive way. It also reflects the likeness of ELF with dialect, which is not insignificant. We can assume that processes discovered in dialect contact research, for example, those leading to dialect levelling, simplification, reallocation and interdialect (e.g. Britain 2013) will also be in evidence in ELF. A number of lects reflecting contact with English have been given jocular nicknames like Swinglish, Czenglish, Manglish or Dunglish. These nicknames reflect the fact that when speakers who share a first language learn a given second language, their idiolects display certain similarities in pronunciation or accent, in syntactic features, lexical choices and so on. These lects, then, with their similarities, which arise from contacts of a particular L1 with English, I would like to call ‘similects’.

Similects arise in parallel, as speakers learn the same L2, but since they already share an L1, they normally use that for communicating with each other. This is also where similects part company with dialects. Dialects arise in local or regional speech communities where people speak to each other, and the specific features that arise in the community result from frequent interactions within that community. By contrast, similects are not lects of any speech community.

Similects are parallel also in that they develop certain similarities even if they are learned in different classrooms, schools and locations, by people of different ages and generations, and at different times. Similects, therefore, remain first-generation hybrids. They do not go through developmental stages in the way community languages do, they do not diversify, change, develop sociolects, varieties or other products of social interaction in a living community. They nevertheless embody language contact.

Clearly, the picture so far is simplified, but it is easier to make the case in a simplified form first, and then add complicating details. Here the important simplification is the abstraction away from multilingualism: many people learning English are bi-or multilingual already, which is why ELF contexts are inherently multilingual, as I have noted elsewhere (e.g. Mauranen 2013), and many users also obviously learn other languages alongside or after English. The similect concept is thus compatible with the notion of English as a multilingua franca that Jenkins (2015) has suggested as an important missing facet in the conceptualisation of ELF. We know from multilingualism studies (e.g. Jarvis and Pavlenko 2007; Pavlenko 2014) that all of a speaker’s languages are present at any time, and that they influence one another constantly. Another simplification is treating everyone’s L1 repertoires as if more or less identical, even though this may not in fact be the case (e.g. De Bot, Lowie and Verspoor 2007). This discussion already veers towards cognition, which will be dealt with more thoroughly below.

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To remain a little while still at the individual level, it might well be argued that language contact takes place in language learners, and therefore similects are manifestations of learner language. However, similects do not fit under a general rubric of learner language. We may note occasional formal resemblance to typical L1-specific learner errors (carefully recorded in learner language studies, notably in the ICLE projects www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-icle.html), but the main difference of learners and users is social. ELF lects are used far beyond any language teaching environment, in authentic second language use (SLU), by speakers in the real world from professionals to tourists and asylum seekers, and in the digital world by anyone anywhere. The sociolinguistic context of a language learning classroom is restricted and specific, with important repercussions to speaker identity and the relationship to language: for a learner, language use is ‘practice’, instrumental to learning, whereas in SLU language is used in its own right, for co-construction of meaning in interaction. One consequence is that while learners are not in a position to change the language it is their objective to learn, any user of a language can initiate changes. Surface similarities of learner errors and non-standard ELF forms thus hide deep incompatibilities (see further Mauranen 2012).

ELF, then, embodies contact between speakers from different similects. Put in another way, speakers who use ELF as their means of communication speak English that is a product of language contact between their other languages and English; a shared first language is the source of similect affinity, and English comes in as they have encountered it in their learning process. ELF, then, means contact between these hybrid, contact-based lects – that is, ELF is a higher-order, or second-order language contact. Therein lies its particular complexity.

A macro-social perspective on ELF needs to address the notion of community. It must be one that fits the nature of a contact language in complex and varied situations, and therefore cannot rest on traditional understandings of a speech community, which is largely local, monolingual, as well as non-mobile. Such ‘sedentary’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) ideals of communities were widely assumed in traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics, even if also criticised (see, e.g. Chambers 1992; Milroy 2002), just as they have been in social sciences more broadly (Bauman 2000; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007).

The challenge of conceptualising community for ELF research has been noted by almost all scholars who have theorised ELF, but no quite satisfactory solution has been reached yet, possibly because this has not been perceived as pivotal to understanding ELF, or perhaps in part also because the notion of community for ELF ought to be more complex than models considered so far. Communities where ELF is a dominant means of communication are not necessarily, perhaps not even very often, based on physical proximity between speakers. Neither are they close-knit communities with multiplex internal contacts. These are key characteristics distinguishing ELF from dialect communities and other similar communities as traditionally conceived in dialectology and sociolinguistic research. Clearly, traditional speech communities are on the whole getting rarer with exponential growth in contemporary multiplicity of mobilities (Urry 2007), including developments in the digital age, when contacts across distances and with the rest of the world are ubiquitous.

Digital means of communication add to our experienced reality, with a consequent need for redefining ‘community’, and the associated mixing of languages and communication patterns. Mobile people change environments often, acquire connections in each, and at the same time maintain contacts with their local communities of origin or earlier residence, their families, relatives and friends. Individuals are simultaneously members of multifarious communities, and, for example, private and professional contacts need not ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca
• Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptualising and Positioning ELF
• Part II The Regional Spread of ELF
• Part III ELF Characteristics and Processes
• Part IV Contemporary Domains and Functions
• Part V ELF in Academia
• Part VI ELF, Policy and Pedagogy
• Part VII ELF into the Future: Trends, Debates, Predictions
• Index