English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking

Paola Vettorel

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110393958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langue anglaise

In a constantly interconnected world communication takes place beyond territorial boundaries, in networks where English works as a lingua franca. The volume explores how ELF is employed in internationally-oriented personal blogs; findings show how bloggers deploy an array of resources to their expressive and interactional aims, combining global and local communicative practices. Implications of findings in ELF and ELT terms are also discussed.

Chapter 1
Internet worlds, languages, users

There are very different Englishes at play, at very different scale-levels, and with very different effects and functions (Blommaert 2010: 195).

It is undeniable that English, as the language which has ‘accompanied’ globalization processes, has now come to represent the main common contact language and lingua franca in an interconnected globalized world. The spread of English at a global level, its use an international means of communication by users who belong to different linguacultures and communities and employ it across territorial and linguistic boundaries, are both unprecedented and unparalleled.

It is certainly also undeniable that globalization has had homogenizing and detrimental ‘corporatization’ effects (Pennycook 2007: 24), both in economic and cultural terms, leading on the one hand to McDonaldization processes, and to great inequalities on the other (cf. e.g. Blommaert 2010 Block 2004). At the same time, however, the extensive opportunities for mobility, both physical and virtual, offered by technological means “are enabling immense and complex flows of people, signs, sounds, images across multiple borders and in multiple directions” (Pennycook 2007: 25) and have opened up possibilities for local(ized) diversity realized as “part of complex networks of communication and cultural flows” (Pennycook 2007: 31). In opposition to a hyperglobalist, homogenizing view to globalization, or to a sceptic one (Held et al. 1999), a transformationalist perspective, while acknowledging the outward projection of globalization “away from local communities towards the global arena” (Dewey 2007a: 336), highlights at the same time the importance of looking at how globalizing processes are realized in localization practices in that “[g]lobal transmissions are locally consumed, and in their consumption are remodelled, reconstituted, transformed” (Dewey 2007a: 337). That is, the fact that “English is currently the dominant language on a global scale, but is constantly being refashioned by interaction between people and institutions on various scales in response to globalization wherein the core-periphery structures of colonial globalization no longer exist” (Saxena and Omoniyi 2010: 213; cf. also Mufwene 2001, 2008). Such a perspective appears particularly relevant when thinking about the flow of information and interconnectedness which has been made possible by new technologies, the Internet in the first place: individuals can communicate over distances that are vast only in geographical terms and become irrelevant since participants gather and interact successfully in virtual spaces, using English as a common lingua franca, appropriating and adapting it to their (local) communicative aims. Thus, “ELF international settings” are viewed “as sites where distinctions such as these [between internal and external affairs, between the international and domestic and thus the local and the global] are indeed blurred, and where there is considerable linguacultural intermixture”; in ELF settings speakers “borrow from multifarious linguistic resources in the way they make use of English to achieve communicative goals”, developing hybridized realizations that are locally enacted (Dewey and Jenkins 2010: 79).

This chapter, after briefly outlining Internet uses in the EU and in Italy, will examine the presence of English and of other languages in web-related practices and in blogs. The role of English as a lingua franca as employed in virtual networking will then be looked at, with the consequent problematization of traditional sociolinguistics concepts such as languages, and varieties, as discrete entities, realized within stable speech communities, by speakers conceived of within a monolingual conceptual framework. In online communicative spaces English in its lingua franca function appears appropriated and adapted to suit the users’ communicative aims, which, while being globally oriented, are at the same time locally situated in terms of identity and community-shared interests.

1.1. Internet users

One of the most visible effects of globalization has been the massive diffusion of the Internet; from over a billion users at the end of 2005 (Internet Wold Stats⁴; Danet and Herring 2007a: 3), since 2011 the Internet connects more that two billion users (Internet Wold Stats⁵). Crystal ([1997] 2003) identifies in increased mobility, both physical and electronic, one of the main reasons for the spread of English as a global language, and reports that from 1990 to 1993 the number of Internet users had grown from a million to 20 million, and to 40 million in 1995; this rise continued exponentially “at a rate of about 10 per cent a month in 1996”, reaching 544 million users across 201 countries in 2002 (Crystal 2003: 119). One implication of this expansion is that users from different territories and linguacultural backgrounds access the web; as Crystal notes, “already in 1999 predictions were being made that in the early 2000s non-English users would exceed English users” (Crystal 2003: 119.). This forecast appeared to be true and realistic, and Internet usage reflects “the world’s linguistic demographics, with English users hovering around 30 per cent” (Crystal 2003: 119.). Although globalization practices related to the media and Internet use have affected “elites far more than other groups, and having access to the technology divides the world into the haves and have-nots”, trends show that even “in parts of the world where there has been low participation (e.g. Africa and South America), Internet access is increasing at a rate of about 20% a year (NUA 2002), which suggests that disparities may narrow if not close” (Wright 2004: 158–159). Looking at recent 2012 data reported by Internet World Stats⁶, in the distribution of Internet Users in the world Asia adds up to 44.8%, with 10.4% for Latin America/ Caribbean countries, 7% for Africa and 3.7% the Middle East, while Europe and North America respectively amount to 21.5% and 11.4%.

As to the old continent, according to Graddol (1997: 50), in 1997 out of 50 million Internet users, 20% were based in Europe, mainly in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden; apart from the UK, where English is a native language, in the above-mentioned other countries the competence in English is reckoned to be high (Nunberg 2000, quoted in Graddol 2006: 45), in some cases nearing the role of a second rather than a foreign language (e.g. Berns 1995: 43–44).

The 2004 Mediappro research (Rivoltella 2006) involving young people aged 12–18 across several countries mainly set in Europe⁷, showed that the Internet had fully become part of 90% European young people’s personal and social life. Together with other communication devices – mobiles in the first place, owned by 95% respondents – the web represented for younger generations an opportunity to keep in touch with their friends, bearing thus a social function. Blogging practices appeared particularly widespread in Belgium, where 38% respondents said they have a personal blog which, together with MSN and e-mails, was for them a way to socially interact with peers (Rivoltella 2006: 72).

According to the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) Mediascope 2008 data⁸, in the same year 178 million Europeans were online every week, 55% of whom each day, particularly in the age range 25-34. The top reason indicated by 73% Europeans who used the web was to keep in touch with friends and relatives; 11% Europeans (7% for Italy) shared self-created content (text, images, photos, videos or music) on websites. The Eurostat ICT survey 2010⁹ reports that 65% Europeans used the Internet at least once a week, a figure which reached 90% for the age range 16–24. Almost 50% Europeans post messages in blogs, chat and social networking sites, reaching 80% for the 16–24 age range; this appeared confirmed in the Pillar 1 Digital Agenda Scoreboard¹⁰ data: Internet usage in the 27 EU countries in 2010 was higher for younger, as well as medium and well-educated middle-aged people.

Recent data from the 2011 and 2012 Internet World Stats¹¹ show that the penetration of the Internet in Europe amounts to 63.2% (58% in 2011) and, when compared to the world average (34.3% in 2012 and 30.2% in 2011), figures are almost doubled, with 68% for Russia (59.7% in 2011), Germany 67.5% (65.1 in 2011) and the UK (52.7% in 2012 and 51.4% in 2011) ranking top¹², and Italy placed sixth (35.8% in 2012 and 30.0% in 2011).

The 2011 European Commission User Language Preferences Online Flash Eurobarometer reports that about 80% Europeans use the web on a daily basis; younger people are confirmed to be ‘heavier’ Internet users, with a 65 per cent daily presence on the web for the15–24 age range (2011: 8). Younger respondents still in the educational system appear more willing to visit websites in English, with 65% in the 15–24 age range agreeing or strongly agreeing.

When looking at Italy, in 2003 the majority of Internet users were under 35, particularly in the 25–34 age range, with a significant presence of teenagers (Rivoltella 2006: 85). The latter however, apart from instant messaging, seemed to rely more on mobile phones than on the Internet for social communicative practices, differently from their European peers (ivi: 99ff.). Half of the respondents in the 2004 Mediappro research conceptualized the web mentioning its social dimension (Rivoltella 2006: 134) as a space for meeting and friendship.

Even more recently (Internet WorldStats 2011) the penetration of the Internet in Italy continues to be lower than in other European countries; the Digital Agenda Scoreboard 2011 illustrates¹³ how, despite the percentage of frequent Internet users being close to the European average, that of regular users (48%) is one of the lowest in the EU, and, similarly, that of people who never used the Internet is one of the highest, reaching 41%. Nevertheless, in line with European trends, younger generations are heavy Internet users: according to national statistics (ISTAT 2009, cited in Ferri 2011: 34–37) 86% young people in the 11–24 age range regularly use the Internet and use Web 2.0 tools, a figure that appears similar to the findings of the Pew surveys for the U.S.

According to the Numedia Bios survey¹⁴, 98.4% Italian university students regularly use a personal computer, and 68.7% an Internet connection for more than 5 hours a day. 42% have a personal blog, and 78% read other blogs. Three Internet users typologies appear to emerge from this survey: 30.1% are defined as “internet@ttivati” [internet@ctivated], i.e. spending a lot of their time on the web; 22.4% as “neo-analogici” [neo-analogical], i.e. still in a way new to the web, and 47% as “digital mass”, holding a critical stance to the interactive qualities of the web (Ferri et al. 2010a, 2010b).

As to online activities, only 2.26% young Internet users write e-mails every day, while 57% employ instant messaging daily, and 63% have created a profile on a social networking website: the latter is thus becoming, particularly in European contexts, the main tool for distance communication, in line with findings of the latest Pew surveys: social networking sites are for a large proportion of teens and young people the preferred means to keep in touch with friends.

Web interactive and participatory practices appear thus to hold a prominent role: according to the above mentioned Numedia survey data, “prosumers” (or “produsers” in Bruns and Jacobs’ terms, 2006) actively participate in the web with content creation and sharing. Despite a decrease in blogging practices by American young people from 55% in 2006 to 28% in 2010 (Ferri 2011: 32), in the Numedia Bios study 42% Italian university students have a blog, and 78% read blogs by other people; the “blogito ergo sum” expression well sums up the self-expression and connection role of this online practice: in the words of a student-informant, “nel momento stesso in cui creo il mio blog, il mio profilo, è proprio perchè sto cercando di connettermi agli altri. Di creare un noi” [in the very moment I create my blog, my profile, it is exactly because I am trying to connect with other people. To create an ‘us’”, my translation] (Ferri et al. 2010b¹⁵).

The 2011 European Commission User Language Preferences Online Flash Eurobarometer¹⁶ shows how the most popular Internet activities in Italy are in line with the EU, i.e. looking up information about education, training or courses; in 2010 only uploading of self-created content and retrieval of information about training and educational opportunities appear for Italy to be above the UE average in terms of Internet users¹⁷, with a significant increase in the first from 2007¹⁸, following the EU trend.

The overall picture emerging from these data is that of a widespread and increased/ing penetration of the Internet in the European, as well as in the Italian scenery. Regular web practices are particularly prominent for younger generations, who use the Internet to keep in touch with friends; a significant proportion reads or maintains a blog, and social networks are on the increase in their social communicative purposes. The wider networking spaces allowed by new technologies provide thus significant room for internationally oriented, translocal practices, where English in its lingua franca role allows connections with other users of different native languages, in practices that are at the same time global and local in that they are realized in virtual communities of different types, as we will see in the last section of this chapter.

1.2. English and the multilingual Internet

On the Net, all languages are as equal as their users wish to make them, and English emerges as an alternative rather than a threat (Crystal ([1997] 2003: 120)

The web has been, at least initially, regarded “as the flagship of global English” due to two main factors: firstly, most Internet hosts were based since the beginning in the U.S. or in English-speaking countries. Secondly, software technology did not initially support the reproduction of alphabets and characters for many non-western languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, thus limiting multilingual browsing (Graddol 1997: 50, 61; cf. also Warschauer and De Florio-Hansen 2003: 5; Danet and Herring 2007a: 8–11, 2007b; Crystal [1997] 2003: 115–116). As Yates explains, “[t]echnological standards such as ASCII, which are based on the English language, have helped tie the new communication media to the English language, making it harder for non-English speakers to exploit the opportunities provided by new media” (1996: 118). Moreover, Internet usage has for long been based in the USA (Yates 1996: 117); even though more recently there is on the web a wider representation of users located in different parts of the world, a large proportion of Internet resources are still located in North America and Europe, a situation which is likely to continue, thus favouring the predominant status of English on the web (Paolillo 2007: 424–426; Crystal ([1997] 2003: 15–120). When compared to other big languages, as for example Chinese, a further factor to be kept in mind is that, differently from English, the former are, at least so far, spoken mainly by a population of native speakers and generally do not function as an international, globally spread lingua franca of communication among native as well as non-native speakers. In the hierarchy of language choice on the Internet (as well as in other contexts, cf. Graddol 2006: 44–45; 2007: 250–252), English is generally at the top, followed in turn by regional and local languages (Graddol 1997: 61; Herring 2002b; 2010b; Danet and Herring 2007a: 22–23, 2007b).

Indeed, Graddol maintained since his 1997 publication that the web would have become increasingly multilingual, in global as in local communities. According to Global Reach data (quoted in Dor 2004: 98), in 1997 English speakers using the web amounted to 45 million, against 16 million non-English-speaking users; by 2003, however, the web had already become much more multilingual: about 230 million users were English- speaking, while non-English speakers had risen to 403 million, and in 2004 the first accounted for 280 million and the latter to at least 657 million (Dor 2004: 99). In 1996 English as the language of home pages was reported to amount to 84.3% (Graddol 1997: 51), while in 1999, this percentage had lowered to 72% (Paolillo 2005: 57).

According to the figures reported in Crystal ([2001] 2006: 232) in 2004 English was the first language of the Internet (35.2%), followed at a distance by Chinese (13.7%), Spanish (9%), Japanese (6.9%) and German (3.2); other languages were represented in much minor proportions. When compared to earlier data referring to the 1990s (Crystal [2001] 2006: 217), however, significant changes can be noticed: English was then reported to be in a totally dominating position with 82.3%, followed by a mere 4% for German, 1.6% for Japanese, 1.5% for French and 1.1 for Spanish, with other languages all well below 1%. Figures referred to 2010 (Crystal 2011: 79) rank English at 27.5% and Chinese at 22.6%; the latter has been growing in the last ten years at a pace which is 4 times quicker than English. These figures appear to be confirmed by Graddol: while in 2000 English accounted for 51.3%, it had decreased to 32% in 2005 (Global Reach 2005, quoted in Graddol 2006: 44; cf. also Paolillo 2005); Barton and Lee (2013: 43) report that according to 2010 Internet World Stats “about 73% of internet users in the world have a first language other than English and the proportion is continuing to grow”. This picture shows that, despite English still remaining the first language of the Internet, other languages have gradually been gaining ground, such as Chinese, Japanese and German.

Thus, while at the beginning English was certainly the language of the web, in the last decade the presence of other major languages has become much more predominant: besides the exponential rise of Chinese when compared to less than a decade ago, we find among the ten top Internet languages Spanish (7.8%), Japanese (5.3%), Portuguese (4.3%), German (4.0%), Arabic (3.3%), French (3.2%), Russian (2.5%) and Korean (2.1%), plus a 17.4% for other languages (Crystal 2011: 79; cf. also Gardner 2007). In terms of globalizing forces, however, Block (2004: 35) points out that

greater diversity does not necessarily mean that all languages are equal: bigger is still better in the pecking order of world languages as much of the proportional weight wrested away from English has been in favou...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Internet worlds, languages, users
• Chapter 2 Blogging worlds
• Chapter 3 Language and Computer-Mediated Communication
• Chapter 4 Bloggers as ELF users
• Chapter 5 Using ELF in wider networking: exploiting linguistic resources
• Chapter 6 Exploiting and integrating plurilingual resources
• Chapter 7 Learning, using and appropriating the language
• Conclusions
• Appendix A – Questionnaire
• References
• Index