Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4, 2003: 556±578
English as a lingua franca:
A threat to multilingualism?
Juliane House
Hamburg University, Germany
In this paper I argue against the widespread assumption that the English
language in its role as lingua franca is a serious threat to national languages and
to multilingualism. I support this argument by making a distinction between
`languages for communication' and `languages for identi®cation'. Further
support for the stance against one-sidedly attacking English as a killer language
will be drawn from the ®ndings of three research projects currently being
carried out at Hamburg University, one on the impact English has on discourse
norms in in¯uential genres in other languages; the second one on the nature of
interactions in English as a lingua franca; and the third one on so-called
`international degree programmes', in which English is the language of
instruction. Finally, I make some tentative suggestions for a new research
paradigm for English as a lingua franca.
KEYWORDS: English as lingua franca, language for communication, language for identi®cation, covert translation, social
macro-acquisition, community of practice
In this paper I question the widespread assumption that English in its role as
a lingua franca is a serious threat to multilingualism in Europe and
elsewhere, and develop an argument against it. I support this argument
by making a distinction between `languages for communication' and
`languages for identi®cation' and by drawing on the ®ndings of three
research projects currently being carried out at Hamburg University. In
conclusion, I make some suggestions for a new research paradigm for
English as a lingua franca (ELF), which may more adequately handle the
impact English, in this role, is having on national languages worldwide.
Firstly, I consider what is to be understood by a `lingua franca', what this
term might mean with regard to the status of global English today, and
what relevant research exists on ELF interactions.
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1. WHAT IS A LINGUA FRANCA? DEFINITIONS AND STATE OF THE
ART IN LINGUA FRANCA RESEARCH
In its original meaning, a lingua franca ± the term comes from Arabic `lisan-alfarang' ± was simply an intermediary language used by speakers of Arabic with
travellers from Western Europe. Its meaning was later extended to describe a
language of commerce, a rather stable variety with little room for individual
variation. This meaning is clearly not applicable to today's global English,
whose major characteristics are its functional ¯exibility and its spread across
many di€erent domains. These two features have led to another new and indeed
remarkable feature: that the number of non-native speakers is substantially
larger than its native speakers (the relationship is about four to one, cf. Graddol
1997). English is thus no longer `owned' by its native speakers, and there is a
strong tendency towards more rapid `de-owning' ± not least because of the
increasing frequency with which non-native speakers use ELF in international
contacts.
But exactly how does ELF di€er from native English? Is it a language for
speci®c purposes, a pidgin, or is it a particular type of interlanguage? Clearly,
ELF is neither a language for speci®c purposes nor a pidgin, because it is not a
restricted code, but a language showing full linguistic and functional range
(Kachru 1997) and serving as a `contact language between persons who share
neither a common native tongue nor a common national culture, and for whom
English is the chosen foreign language of communication' (Firth 1996: 240).
In an attempt to de®ne a lingua franca from a formal perspective, Gramkow
Andersen (1993) o€ers a de®nition that characterizes ELF in the following way:
`There is no consistency in form that goes beyond the participant level, i.e., each
combination of interactants seems to negotiate and govern their own variety of
lingua franca use in terms of pro®ciency level, use of code-mixing, degree of
pidginization, etc.' (Gramkow Andersen 1993: 108). Here we have the most
important ingredients of a lingua franca: negotiability, variability in terms of
speaker pro®ciency, and openness to an integration of forms of other languages.1 All this reminds one, of course, of an `interlanguage': a concept ®rst
introduced by Selinker as `the observable output resulting from a speaker's
attempt to produce a foreign norm, i.e., both his errors and non-errors. It is
assumed that such behaviour is highly structured . . . and that it must be dealt
with as a system, not as an isolated collection of errors' (Selinker 1969: fn. 5).
The salient concepts here are `foreign norm', `errors', `non-errors', `system'
and, by implication, `the native speaker' (whose competence is the yardstick for
deviations from a norm and for system-errors). It is vis-aÁ-vis these concepts that
the di€erential approach to ELF can now be outlined: ®rst, ELF talk cannot be
conceived with a view to an ideal English norm, and the ELF speaker cannot be
measured in his/her competence vis-aÁ-vis `the native speaker'. A lingua franca
speaker is not per de®nitionem not fully competent in the part of his/her linguistic
knowledge under study. Second, the object of inquiry for ELF is not a
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
HOUSE
psycholinguistic `in between-system' developing inside a speaker on his/her way
to full mastery of the English language system; that is, the perspective is not one
with a view to development towards becoming a `proper member' of another
speech community.2
More adequate for ELF than the interlanguage framework is the multilingual
speaker possessing what Cook (1993) has called `multicompetence', that is, a
distinctive state of mind, unlike a ®nal stage of knowledge like the native
monolingual's competence. The focus is here on the possession of more than
one set of linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge in one and the same
individual, on language use rather than on development and acquisition, and
on the socio-pragmatic functions of language choice. To be fair, Selinker
(1992), when he `re-discovered' interlanguage twenty years later, mentioned
the issue of `World Englishes' characterizing these varieties in terms of
`fossilization' on a cline to nativisation, and in terms of cultural and contextual
transfer, but he also pointed to the need to discover `non-native varieties of the
international language English'.
From the perspective of pragmatics and discourse studies, ELF discourse as
one type of non-native±non-native interaction has been examined with a focus
on how meaning is negotiated with the help of those unstable and varying
resources available to ELF interactants. This interactional approach is concerned with social rather than individual psychological phenomena, and it
focuses on language use. The lingua franca concept is useful particularly when
contrasted with the more ideologically fused cognates such as `foreigner talk' or
`learner interaction', because one here `attempts to conceptualize the participant simply as a language user whose real-world interactions are deserving of
unprejudiced description rather than as a person conceived aÁ priori to be the
possessor of incomplete or de®cient communicative competence, putatively
striving for the `target' competence of an idealized `native speaker' (Firth
1996: 241).
One of the few empirical studies on ELF talk was conducted by Firth (1996)
and his associates. They analysed ELF telephone conversations between employees of Danish companies and their foreign partners supplementing their
analyses with ethnographic information. In their ®ndings, the authors stress
above all the `¯eeting' nature of ELF talk, the ¯uidity of norms re¯ecting
participants' insecurity regarding which norms are operative. They also point
to ELF interactants' attempts to `normalize' potential trouble sources, rather
than attend to them explicitly via repair initiation, reformulation, etc. As long as
a certain threshold of understanding is achieved, ELF participants appear to
adopt a principle of `Let it pass', an interpretive procedure which makes the
interactional style both `robust' and explicitly consensual. While one might
assume that such a procedure endangers e€ective communication, as the
super®cial consensus may well mask deeper sources of trouble arising out of
di€erences in culturally based knowledge frames, lingua franca talk turns out to
be, in fact, basically meaningful and `ordinary'. Unclear talk is routinely `passed
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558
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over' on the common sense assumption that it will either eventually become
clear or end up as redundant. The robustness of the talk is strengthened by a
remarkable number of joint discourse productions. All these strategies seem to
show that ELF users are competent enough to be able to monitor each others'
moves at a high level of awareness.
The results of this work are basically compatible with Meierkord's (1996)
®ndings. She analysed audiotaped English dinner-table conversations elicited in
a British student residence from subjects of many di€erent L1 backgrounds.
Meierkord compared the structural characteristics of her ELF data with relevant
®ndings from the literature on native±native and native±non-native talk. She
found that ELF users employed a reduced repertoire of tokens, used shorter
turns and much more non-verbal communication in comparison to her native
English sample. But, like Firth, she also established in her analyses a certain
`robustness' of the ELF talk.
More recently, LesznyaÂk (2002) analysed an ELF interaction at an international students' meeting in the Netherlands, comparing it with equivalent
baseline interactions by groups of native speakers of English, Hungarian and
German, and an interaction between English native speakers and speakers of
English as a foreign language (EFL). She found that ELF users (as opposed to EFL
speakers) seemed to follow a dynamic model of topic management, and engaged
in a process of gradually ®nding common ground, of negotiating footing and
communicative rules such that their initially divergent (`chaotic') behaviour
became consensually transformed into convergent behavioural patterns. ELF
interactants in LesznyaÂk's data work out the rules for their particular encounter
zeroing in on a shared interpretation of the social situation they are ®nding
themselves in.
In sum then, ELF appears to be neither a restricted language for special
purposes, nor a pidgin, nor an interlanguage, but one of a repertoire of di€erent
communicative instruments an individual has at his/her disposal, a useful and
versatile tool, a `language for communication'. As such it can be distinguished
from those other parts of the individual's repertoire which serve as `language(s)
for identi®cation' (HuÈllen 1992). In the following section I will elaborate on this
distinction which is a functional one, and is in line with my view of language as
a means to ful®l certain functions in human experience ± a view uniting both
cognitive-individual and social foci on language.
2. LANGUAGES FOR COMMUNICATION VERSUS LANGUAGES FOR
IDENTIFICATION: SOME SOCIO-POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS
ELF can be regarded as a language for communication, that is, a useful
instrument for making oneself understood in international encounters. It is
instrumental in enabling communication with others who do not speak one's
own L1.3 In ELF use, speakers must continuously work out a joint basis for their
interactions, locally construing and intersubjectively ratifying meanings. In
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
HOUSE
using ELF, speakers are unlikely to conceive of it as a `language for identi®cation': it is local languages, and particularly an individual's L1(s), which are
likely to be the main determinants of identity, which means holding a stake in
the collective linguistic-cultural capital that de®nes the L1 group and its
members. Kramsch (2002) gives a beautiful example of the distinction between
using language for communicative purposes and using it for identi®catory
purposes, and the type of a€ective-emotive quality involved in identi®cation.
She quotes from an autobiography of a speaker of Vietnamese as L1: `As for
English I do speak the language but I don't think I'll ever talk it. English ¯ows
from the mind to the tongue and then to the pages of books . . . I only talk
Vietnamese. I talk it with all my senses. Vietnamese does not stop on my tongue,
but ¯ows with the warm, soothing lotus tea down my throat like a river giving
life to the landscape in her path. It rises to my mind along the vivid images of my
grandmother's house and my grandmother . . .'(Kramsch 2002: 98±99).
Linguistically determined identity need not be unitary and ®xed, but can be
multi-faceted, non-unitary and contradictory (Norton 2000), when an individual speaks more than one language. Because ELF is not a national language,
but a mere tool bereft of collective cultural capital, it is a language usable
neither for identity marking, nor for a positive (`integrative') disposition toward
an L2 group, nor for a desire to become similar to valued members of this L2
group ± simply because there is no de®nable group of ELF speakers.4 ELF users,
then, use ELF as a transactional language for their own communicative
purposes and advantage. Such a largely utilitarian motive seems to me to be
incompatible with viewing ELF users ± as I take, for example, Phillipson (1992)
to do ± as `pawns' in an imperialistic game, where formerly militaristic and
colonial inroads are now linguistically replayed. There is a sad truth behind de
Swaan's (2001) assessment of the (politically correct) ®ght against `linguistic
imperialism', `linguicism' and the proclamation of everybody's right to speak
the language of their choice. `Alas', he writes, `what decides is not the right of
human beings to speak whatever language they wish, but the freedom of
everybody else to ignore what they say in the language of their choice' (2001:
52). If one wants to communicate beyond one's own local circle, one will have
to (and often want to) learn a language which links one with wider circles of
communication, with a language with a high `communication value (Q-value)'
(de Swaan 2001: 33€.).
Using ELF for instrumental purposes does not necessarily displace national or
local languages, as they are used for di€erent purposes. As Bisong (1995) points
out with reference to Nigeria, English performs a useful function in this
multilingual society, and it is no longer perceived as an `imperial language'
to be learnt at all costs. In Nigeria, English has become one of the languages
available for use, and it is its communication potential which makes people
decide to use English. Arguments such as the ones brought forward by
Phillipson and others may be seen as patronising since they imply that ELF
users do not know what is in their interest. In support of this argument, I can
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560
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refer to the case of my native Germany where English in its role as a language
with a `high communication value' was welcomed by many after World War II,
not least because of its (maybe naõÈve) association with democratic statehood. In
West Germany, English was embraced wholeheartedly as a means of helping
people forget the past. A similar process is currently taking place in Eastern
Europe, where English is welcomed as an auxiliary language and as a means to
discard Russian, which had been imposed, but eventually failed, as a language
of inter-state communication. Clashes and con¯icts of loyalty between native
languages and Russian often occurred in the former Soviet Union. The fear
fuelled by some that a hegemonic language would squash native languages was
therefore most certainly true of Russian in the Soviet Empire and its satellites ±
in the case of English, the situation is di€erent.
Paradoxical as this may seem, the very spread of ELF may stimulate members
of minority languages to insist on their own local language for emotional
binding to their own culture, history and tradition, and there is, indeed, a strong
countercurrent to the spread of ELF in that local varieties and cultural practices
are often strengthened. One example is the revival of German language folk
music, songs in local dialects such as Bavarian to counteract pop music in
English only. Using ELF as a medium of border-crossing to set up as many expert
communities as necessary in science, economics, education, etc. cannot be seen
as encroaching on established `roots'.
As has happened in many parts of the world before, a diglossia situation is
now developing in Europe ± English for various `pockets of expertise' and nonprivate communication on the one hand, and national and local varieties for
a€ective, identi®catory purposes on the other hand. As a language with a high
communicative value, ELF has naturally acquired a special status in the
European Union (EU) that sets it o€ from all other EU languages. But this
status has been consistently tabooed. In the absence of any explicit EU language
policy, a `mute immobility in matters of language prepares the ground for a
stampede towards English' (de Swaan 2001: 171). It is also an open secret that
the EU's supposedly humane multilingualism is but an illusion. Firstly, the EU
recognizes one and only one ocial language for every member state, a position
at variance with the EU's ocial display of respect for the language rights of
each and every minority language group in Europe. Secondly, some languages
in the EU are (and have always been) more equal than others: from the outset,
French, supported by an aggressive language policy, has held a singularly
privileged position as the only ocial language of the EU's precursor, and as an
important language spoken in all three major EU domiciles. Since the French
privilege is now being threatened, there is a ®erce rivalry between French and
English, but English has in fact become the EU's lingua franca (de Swaan 2001:
174).
The illusion of multilingualism in the EU, and the lip-service paid to the ideal
of a multiplicity of languages, is also costly and cumbersome; witness the
unwieldy machinery of translation, which will probably be de facto impossible
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
HOUSE
once there are 27 or more member states. In Koskinen's (2000) insider
experience, the EU commission's translation bureau, the largest in the world,
translates the EU's illusion of equality into an illusion of facile translatability.
The value of translation is that of a living symbol of the high ideal of equality,
that is, it is important that a translation exists, not what it is like and what it
does. According to Koskinen, translators often suspect that no one ever reads
their ®nished translation. Important working papers are quickly read in English;
by the time the translations are ready, the new information is old information ±
simply because for a translation to come into being, there has to be an original.
Inherent in a translation, therefore, is its delayed nature. Many also doubt the
translations' accuracy and openly prefer to read the more reliable English (and
French) originals. Another curious feature of EU translations is that they are
often not marked as translations as though a translation were but a version of
`the same thing' critically dismissing real-life cultural di€erences that need to be
taken account of in a process of `cultural ®ltering' (House 1997).
The EU's ostensible multilingualism (and its particularly strong resistance to
adopting ELF, cf. the analysis in Fishman 1996) is one of its key characteristics,
which also sets it apart from many other international organizations. Instead of
having openly opted for a manageable number of working languages, all the
ocial languages of the member states have been given equal status. With the
increased number of member states, this policy is a serious problem, a problem
which could be solved by adopting ELF for the EU. Once the position of English
as the vehicular language were recognized, resources would be freed for
supporting all other European languages. ELF would need to be taught
intensively and early on as a true second language. More money and time
could then be allotted for teaching and otherwise supporting other European
languages (especially minority languages) in a ¯exible fashion, tailor-made to
regionally and locally di€ering needs. If one makes the distinction between
languages for communication, such as English today, and languages for
identi®cation ± mother tongues, regional, local, intimate varieties of language
± ELF need not be a threat. It can be seen as strengthening the complementary
need for native local languages that are rooted in their speakers' shared history,
cultural tradition, practices, conventions, and values as identi®catory potential.
To support this argument as well as the line of argumentation followed
throughout this section, there follows a brief outline of three empirical research
projects currently being conducted at Hamburg University.
3. SOME RELEVANT RESEARCH FINDINGS
3.1 The project `Covert translation'
Given the widespread use of ELF in many domains of contemporary life, one
must ask whether ELF's omnipresence may not result in changes in the local
languages used alongside English. It is well known that there has been, for
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decades, a massive in¯ux of English words and collocations into many other
languages. However annoying this is for the purists, these lexical loans and
direct translations, which are most conspicuous in domains such as media,
advertising, life style, youth culture etc., might be brushed o€ as `only' a€ecting
the `open system' of lexis leaving the `heart of a language', its structure, intact.
In Germany, for instance, most people are used to hearing strange new routines
such as `Lass mich allein' (Leave me alone) instead of the conventional `Lass
mich in Ruh'. And although Germans are faced with a growing number of
crude direct translations such as `Hartwarenhaus' (Hardware store), an alien
word in German, and innumerable English lexical items in German texts like
`department', `share holder value', etc., such English inserts are probably as
transient as they are innocuous. But what about the more hidden, but nevertheless much more serious in¯uence of the English language on textual norms
in other languages? In a research project currently conducted at Hamburg
University and funded by the German Science Foundation at its Centre on
Multilingualism (cf. House 2002a), this very question is being investigated:
whether and how ELF in¯uences textual norms in covert translation and parallel
text production. In a covert translation, the function the source text has in its
local source language context is maintained, and this maintenance is achieved
through the use of a `cultural ®lter' with which culture-speci®c textual norms in
the source language community are adapted to conventional norms in the
`receiving' language community.5 Given the ubiquity of ELF, this adaptation
process may now be in a process of change. We therefore ask whether crosscultural di€erence in textualisation conventions gives way to similarity in these
conventions, and whether a process is underway which may eventually result
in cross-culturally similar processes of text production. The global hypothesis
underlying this project is therefore that German (French, Spanish, etc.)6 textual
norms are adapted to anglophone ones. These adaptations can be located along
parameters of culturally determined communicative preferences such as preferred foci on the interpersonal or the ideational function, and on informational
vagueness or speci®city as they have emerged from my own German±English
contrastive work (e.g. House 2003) and many other comparative studies (e.g.
Clyne 1987). Parametrical changes may also entail `anglicisation' in terms of
information structure or word order, for example. Concretely, we have set up
several working hypotheses referring to a shift from a conventionally strong
`content-orientation' and informational explicitness of German texts to an
anglophone `addressee orientation', inference-inducing implicitness and propositional opaqueness. The work also considers shifts in information structure
from packing lexical information integratively and hierarchically to presenting
information in a more loosely linear, `sentential' way.
These hypotheses are tested using a dynamic, implicitly diachronic translation and parallel text corpus of some 500 texts (with a core corpus consisting of
about 90,000 words and a monitor corpus consisting of about 410,000 words).
At present, this corpus contains texts from three genres: economic texts from
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
HOUSE
globalized companies; popular science; and computer texts. It is made up of
three parts: a primary corpus comprising original English texts and their
published translations into German; a parallel corpus comprising authentic
(i.e. non-translated) texts in English and other relevant languages from the
same three genres; and a validation corpus holding translations from the same
three genres in the `opposite direction', that is, from German etc. into English. It
also has interviews with translators, editors, writers and other persons involved
in text production and reception. To further enrich our analyses we have
collected English and German texts similar in topic orientation which have
appeared in the recently established parallel editions of newspapers, such as the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung/International Herald Tribune.
We have so far followed a case study approach involving in-depth analysis
and comparison of textual exemplars, that is, English source texts and German
translations as well as pairs of parallel texts. The analyses follow House's
translation model (1997), which is based on Hallidayan systemic-functional
theory, register linguistics, discourse analysis and text linguistics. They are
carried out both from a micro- and a macro-perspective, and their ultimate goal
is to reconstruct (and compare) the types of motivated choices text producers
made in order to create this, and only this, text for a particular e€ect, a
particular audience, in particular `contexts of situation', and to establish the
extent to which `cultural ®ltering' has taken place.
Tentative results of the analyses of some 60 English and German translational pairs and parallel texts as well as some 15 interviews show that our
hypothesis is basically not con®rmed. Widespread borrowing of English lexical
items and routines is not accompanied by changes in the make-up of German
texts: German and English texts di€er in their `interpersonal' orientation (or
`involvement' in the sense of Biber 1988) as they did 30 years ago (House
1977). In German texts, `addressee orientation' still functions di€erently from
the way it does in anglophone texts. There is, for instance, a preference for a
`didactic manner of information presentation' in the German texts with frequent
elaboration of information. Consider the following extracts from the journal
Scienti®c American and its German satellite publication Spektrum der Wissenschaft. (I have provided English glosses (back translations, BT) of the German
translation to ease comprehension.) The German translations in Spektrum der
Wissenschaft were produced by in-house translators.
Excerpt 1
M. Gazzaniga
`The split brain revisited' (Scienti®c American July 1998)
`Rechtes und linkes Gehirn: Split-Brain und Bewuûtsein' (Spektrum
der Wissenschaft Dezember 1998)
(BT: Right and left brain: Split-brain and consciousness)
1
2
Groundbreaking work that began more than a quarter of a century ago has led
to ongoing insights about brain organization and consciousness.
1
Jahrzehntelange Studien an Patienten mit chirurgisch getrennten
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2 GroûhirnhaÈlften haben das VerstaÈndnis fuÈr den funktionellen Aufbau des
3 Gehirns und das Wesen des Bewuûtseins vertieft.
(BT: Decade-long studies on patients with surgically separated brain hemispheres
have deepened the understanding of the functional organization of the brain and the
essence of consciousness.)
Excerpt 1 shows how the German translator elaborates the information content
by pre-empting imaginary reader questions about speci®c circumstantial
elements of extent, location in time and place, manner, etc. The English text
shows a tendency towards `genre mixing', that is, using mechanisms which
readers know from journalism, advertising, sermons and other persuasively
oriented genres. The e€ect of this hybridisation can be seen in overt `addressee
involvement', and the creation of `human interest' by drawing readers into the
institutional context in which the writer operates thus o€ering readers possibilities of identi®cation. In the English popular science texts, this is often achieved
through mental process (in the sense of Halliday) imperatives in initial parts of
the texts, which then frame the entire text. This framing e€ect is not replicated
in the German translation. Consider Excerpt 2:
Excerpt 2
S. Buchbinder
1
2
3
4
5
6
`Avoiding infection after HIV exposure' (Scienti®c American July
1998)
`PraÈvention nach HIV-Kontakt' (Spektrum der Wissenschaft Oktober
1998)
(BT: Prevention after HIV-contact)
Suppose you are a doctor in an emergency room
and a patient tells you she was raped two hours earlier.
She is afraid she may have been exposed to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS
but has heard that there is a `morning-after pill' to prevent HIV infection.
Can you in fact do anything to block the virus
from replicating and establishing infection?
1 In der Notfallaufnahme eines Krankenhauses berichtet eine Patientin
2 sie sei vor zwei Stunden vergewaltigt worden
3 und nun in Sorge, dem AIDS-Erreger ausgesetzt zu sein,
4 sie habe aber gehoÈrt, es gebe eine `Pille danach',
5 die eine HIV-Infektion verhuÈte.
6 Kann der Arzt uÈberhaupt irgendetwas tun,
7 was eventuell vorhandene Viren hindern wuÈrde,
8 sich zu vermehren und sich dauerhaft im KoÈrper einzunisten?
(BT: In the emergency room of a hospital a patient reports that she had been raped
two hours ago and was now worrying that she had been exposed to the AIDS-virus.
She said she had heard that there was an `after-pill', which might prevent an
HIV-infection. Can the doctor in fact do anything which might prevent potentially
existing virusses from replicating and establishing themselves permanently in the
body?)
The German translation in Excerpt 2 is obviously culturally ®ltered: the
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
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strategies of addressee-involvement in the English text, as well as o€ers to the
addressees to identify themselves with agents in the text (lines 1 and 5) are not
replicated in German, that is, German generic conventions are upheld. That
this `resistance' is a conscious one, was documented in the interviews with
translators and editors: the tendency towards `humanising' textual material in
English popular science texts (via framing techniques, personal deixis, mood
switches, etc.) is consciously shunned in favour of a more `rational', more
`scienti®c' (`more German') character of texts in this genre, then and now deeply
anchored in cultural tradition.
Our ®ndings in this project show that the types of pragmatic shift or `cultural
®ltering' conventionally undertaken as texts travel through time and space are
exactly what they were before. There are no changes in addressee-orientation,
no modi®cations along those parameters of cultural di€erence which I hypothesized on the basis of contrastive work. German discourse norms, and, judging
by the few analyses of translations from English into French, Spanish and
Portuguese we conducted, also local discourse norms in other European
languages, remain unin¯uenced by ELF. However, preliminary analyses of
most recent textual specimens do seem to point to a change in the expression
of `subjectivity' and `stance', addressee-orientation and genre mixing. But,
before we are justi®ed in speaking of a `trend change', much more quantitative,
diachronic corpus research is necessary. This will be the next step in this
project.
3.2 The project `Communicating in English as a lingua franca'7
In this project we are looking at the nature of ELF interactions between speakers
of di€erent L1s. We have collected data from international students at Hamburg
University (age 25±35), from many di€erent L1 backgrounds, who were asked
to interact amongst themselves and with members of the support sta€ of
Hamburg University. The data was elicited in a mixture of authentic and
simulated ELF interactions as well as in more experimental set-ups. It contains:
(1) ELF interactions (groups of 4 international students); (2) comparable native
English interactions (groups of 4 L1 English speakers); (3) comparable ELF
interactions (groups of 4 interactants with English and German as L1s); (4)
dyadic interactions between international students and support sta€; and (5)
retrospective interviews eliciting interactants' metapragmatic assessments.
I will here present some selected results of the analysis of parts of data type (1)
(one 30 minute group interaction) complemented by data type (5). Participants
were two female and two male native speakers of German (Brit), Korean ( Joy),
Chinese (Wei) and Indonesian (Mauri).8 As a stimulus for the ensuing talk, they
were given an article from a German weekly on the role of ELF. The interaction
was taped and transcribed, and each of the four participants was asked to give
retrospective feedback two weeks later. Participants listened to the talk, read
the transcripts, and were asked to comment on `critical points' revealed in the
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566
567
preceding analysis ± those parts of the interaction that pointed to imminent
interactional trouble. The analysis was conducted on the basis of a model of
spoken discourse and the analytic categories provided therein (Edmondson
1981; Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989).9
The following trends of ELF discourse behaviour have emerged from both the
analysis and the post hoc interviews. In line with the literature discussed above,
we found remarkably few misunderstandings10 and a concomitant multitude of
`Let it pass'. As opposed to the many misunderstandings I detected in my
analyses of native±non-native talk (e.g. see House 2003), this ELF talk seems to
be qualitatively di€erent in nature. This impression is based on three speci®c
®ndings:
Finding one. Although interactants seem to transfer foreign (L1) conventions
into the ELF discourse, this does not lead to misunderstandings. For instance,
the three Asian participants employ topic management strategies in a striking
way, recycling a speci®c topic regardless of where and how the discourse had
developed at any particular point. This behaviour makes the entire interaction
resemble a set of parallel monologues with each participant following his/her
own macro-theme, the result being a gross under-attuning of individual turns.
But despite this behaviour on the part of three of the four interactants,
communication does not break down.
Excerpt 3 exempli®es the `monologic tracks' followed by the Asian students. (I
have included the previous speaker's turn, so as to better show the type of nonsequitur that occurs due to interactants' insistence in pulling the conversation
towards their particular pet topic.) Mauri's topic or leitmotif is `business' (half of
Mauri's 24 turns are devoted to this topic):
Excerpt 3
Wei:
They don't have tradition to learn sorry to learn German perhaps Japanese a
little bit tradition @ but not German
Mauri: Yes the importance of language meaning depends on business erm (2 sec)
issues (2 sec) the more important the business issue the more you have to
learn this language because all the people use this language if you cannot
speak in this language you lost and you have to so I think it's begins erm
of course with the colonialism I think too because the history of this
development how the language in very early period
Joy:
Mauri:
Yes I think so and non-native norms because there are (2 sec) a lot of norms
language norms and I think it's very dicult in reality to understand people
from the other countries other culture backgrounds
Also language erm (3 sec) the languages develop itselves so maybe if you
don't stay in the countries so you cannot erm, you cannot erm (2 sec) get
with this development I think so if you just use this language English as
business language . . . .
The idiocratic type of turn coherence in Excerpt 3 seems to result from a
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
HOUSE
single-minded pursuance of Mauri's individual script. Although I do not speak
of the L1s involved and have not collected relevant baseline data and cannot
pretend to have conducted even a rudimentary contrastive analysis, I do have
participants' retrospective subjective interpretations and metapragmatic assessments. Relevant here is Mauri's comment. He suggested that his topic recycling
may stem from transfer of native Indonesian conventions of discourse construction in which topics are cyclically re-introduced, very much in the way
Kaplan (1966) suggests in his much-maligned `Doodles' article. Joy also
con®rmed this explanation of the culturally determined topic management in
this data.
Finding two. A second ®nding in this data refers to the remarkably frequent use
of a particular discourse marker: the Represent (Edmondson 1981). It is used, as
its name suggests, to `re-present' the previous speaker's move in order to aid the
present speaker's working memory in both his/her comprehension and production processes, to provide textual coherence, to signal uptake, to request
con®rmation, or to indicate to the previous speaker that there is no intention
to `steal' his/her turn. Represents, also known in the literature as `echoing',
`mirroring', or `shadowing' devices, occur in many di€erent genres such as
therapeutic interviews, educational talk and aviation control discourse. They
are multifunctional discourse lubricants, acting simultaneously as an encapsulation of previously given information and as a new instantiation creating
linkage across turns through redundancy and the construction of lexical
paradigmatic clusters. But Represents can also act as meta-communicative
procedures and as such serve to reinforce metalinguistic awareness in participants ± a very useful function in ELF talk given the linguistic fragility of this
genotypically multilingual discourse. Consider Excerpts 4 and 5:
Excerpt 4
Brit:
And if erm things like Nigerian English, Indian English which is a sort of
variety in itself it should be respected
Mauri: Should be respected
Excerpt 5
Joy:
And you mean that English (2 sec) is really getting important or taken for
the education because the grammar is syntactical erm the grammar is very
[easy]
Wei:
[is easy] is very easy
In her interview, Joy suggested that the frequency of Represents may not only
stem from interactants' attempt to support their own working memory and
facilitate processing, but may also be a sign of `Asian politeness', where an
explicitly verbalised acknowledgement of the interlocutor's message counts as
part of being polite. Wei contradicted this view stating that he used repetition to
help himself onto his own response, but Mauri declared that it is more
important in a dicussion to reach some sort of consensus than to give direct
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568
569
answers to particular questions. In order to assess the validity of these di€erent
interpretations of the functions of Represents in this data, analyses of a larger
corpus are clearly needed. At the present time, no conclusive answer can be
given.
Finding three. We also found a strong demonstration of solidarity and
consensus-orientation in this data, especially on the part of the Asian
participants who, despite their mono-thematic monologues, also manage to
cooperate, and co-construct utterances in a display of solidarity ± the solidarity
of non-native ELF speakers. Consider Excerpt 6:
Excerpt 6
Mauri: I think it begins erm of course with the colonialism I think too because the
history of this development how the language in the very early period erm
(3 sec)
Joy:
Build up the basis
Mauri: Yes
Joy:
To be a world language
Mauri: Yes
Such collaborative discourse production as evident in Excerpt 6 is so frequent in
my data that it may well be its most important feature. Interestingly, it is only
Brit, the German speaker, who tried to pierce the bubble of apparent mutual
intelligibility and overt collaboration. In her interview, Brit stated she had felt
there was a certain `Asian style' of consensus-orientation, that is, a tendency to
ignore potentially troublesome remarks, and to resist argumentative talk in
which interactants' moves might be challenged. Brit was particularly struck by
the fact that her (provocative) questions were simply not answered! The fact that
Brit longed for more argumentative talk can also be taken as con®rming transfer
of her German interactional preferences ± preferences hypothesized in a series of
contrastive German±English pragmatic analyses (see above p. 564), one of them
referring to a particular emphasis on transactional versus phatic talk.
The consensus orientation evident in Asian students' discourse behaviour in
this ELF data could be interpreted with reference to Tajfel's (1981) assumption
of a continuum of interpersonal and group identity, such that one might posit a
focus on group identity. However, the individual±group dichotomy may be too
simplistic: speakers of L1s such as Korean, German, Indonesian and Chinese in
my data are, when using ELF, individuals who tend to transfer their L1
discourse conventions into their ELF talk ± while at the same time constructing
something as ¯uid and immaterial as the `community of ELF speakers', a
consortium that is always constituted anew in any ongoing talk.
In sum then ± and despite the diculty of separating ELF speakers' L1 transfer
from their restricted ELF competences ± I would hypothesize ®rstly that ELF
users' native culture-conditioned ways of interacting are `alive' in the medium
of the English language. The second hypothesis would be that ± despite the
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
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resulting diversity of `voices' in the medium of English, or maybe because using
a common code for communication unites ELF speakers as non-native speakers
(`We're all in the same boat') ± ELF appears to be a useful communicative tool.
While ELF users may certainly need to improve their `pragmatic ¯uency' (House
1996b), their strategic competence is arguably intact, and it is this strategic
competence which enables ELF speakers to engage in meaningful negotiation.
3.3 The project `English as a medium of instruction in German universities'
In this project recently started at Hamburg University (Motz in press), we are
investigating how English, now increasingly used as a medium of instruction in
German universities, interacts with the domestic German language, and how
international students perceive, and react to, this `diglossic situation'. The
background for this research is the unprecedented case in German society
that national universities are instituting courses of study which no longer use
German as the language of instruction. Using English in tertiary education is, of
course, one important dimension of `angli®cation'. While ELF in tertiary
education is common in former British and American colonies and their spheres
of in¯uence (Fishman 1996: 637), there is now a new trend of also using ELF in
European tertiary education. In the German context, this is ®rstly a re¯ection of
the generally balanced attitude of the German intellectual eÂlite towards ELF
(Ammon 2001), which is of course in stark contrast to the French eÂlite's view of
ELF (Flaitz 1988). Secondly, it is a result of German universities' attempt to
internationalise German universities and attract more (paying!) foreign students, whose number has been steadily decreasing. Universities have recently
reacted to this attrition by introducing `international degree programmes',
where English is either the sole medium of instruction or is used alongside
German, the latter being o€ered in special (mostly intensive) language courses.
The project involves an investigation of how the fact that English is used in the
academic environment while German is used in everyday life, a€ects students'
motivation to study, their actual use of either language and their view of this
situation. Data has been collected inside a Master of European Studies
programme and consists of several parts: (1) relevant background documents;
(2) observations of instruction followed by retrospective interviews; (3) interviews with international students eliciting self-assessments of previous language
learning experience and the `two languages situation'; (4) diary studies with a
small sample of students; and (5) students' self-taped authentic everyday
interactions with di€erent German interlocutors.
Preliminary results of the analyses of this data suggest that students prefer
initial instruction in `English only' followed by a gradual progression to German
as the medium of instruction, if and when their competence in German allows
for such a transition. Students' self-assessments of their needs and perceptions of
this `two language situation' are in line with the new ocial policy followed by
the German Academic Exchange Service, where such a `gentle' progression
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570
571
from ELF to German is now also ocially favoured. As opposed to `English
only' programmes, such a progression helps increase the attractiveness of the
national language both as an academic medium and a tool for surviving in
everyday German life. The interviews reveal that English is seen by teachers and
students both as a useful means of easing communication in initial stages and
as a useful (permanent) stand-by for solving potential communication problems. English is not really seen as being in competition to German; it is described
as `a class of its own', a supranational, auxiliary means of communication.
To sum up, all three research projects cannot be interpreted as indicating that
there is a serious encroachment of ELF upon a native language: in translation
and parallel text production, native norms are upheld; ELF interactions show
phenotypical (and maybe genotypical) L1 presence; and, in English-medium
instruction, moves are made to involve local language use. Clearly, however,
more research in this new ®eld of inquiry is necessary if research is to match,
and indeed provide some guidance for, the global use of English as a language
for communication. Below, I make some suggestions for a new research
paradigm. They derive, either directly or indirectly, from the results of the
work described above and the assessment of the role of ELF given in the ®rst part
of this paper.
4. ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: TOWARDS A NEW RESEARCH
PARADIGM
There are three signi®cant points:
1.
Instead of being caught in the tunnel vision of looking at ELF inside the
interlanguage framework, which focuses on learners' de®cits in native speaker
competence, it is more fruitful to look at ELF both from a micro-(individual)
perspective and from a macro-(social) perspective. Social `macro-acquisition'
(Brutt-Gri‚er 2002: 135 €.) implies that the origin and result of ELF acquisition
and use are social processes, which arise out of the socio-historical conditions of
language spread and may lead to language change. The primary input is not
coming from native speakers but from a group of speakers who can be
characterized as sharing a multilingual habitus and multilingual communicative competence. Models of language learning and use which stress the
importance of social processes a€ecting individuals are in line with early
Russian theories of language learning and use as suggested by Galperin
(1980). In his cultural-historical `interiorisation theory', psycholinguistic
processes develop in the interaction of the individual with other speakers in
di€erent contexts, such that events and states of a€airs in the external world are
`taken inside' to construct a mental reality that is both individual and socially
shared.11 Reconsidering this social acquisition theory may be of bene®t for ELF
research.
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
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2.
Rejecting the venerable psycholinguistic concept of an `interlanguage' as a basis
for conceptualizing ELF ®nds its parallel in the rejection of the established
sociolinguistic concept of the `speech community' in its various senses: from
Fishman's view that a `speech community (a term probably translated from the
German Sprachgemeinschaft) is one, all of whose members share at least one
single speech variety and the norms for its appropriate use' (1971: 232) ± a
view basically shared by Hymes (1972: 53); to Labov's (1972: 120) interpretation of the speech community as located in a population on the basis of
variation in use and regularity of judgement of some key linguistic features;
to Preston's (1989) proposal that speech communities are united by speakers'
shared beliefs about their own language and the language of outgroups; to
Kerswill (1993), who added the criteria of the speaker's nativeness inside a
speech community and the closely related nature, at all linguistic levels, of the
language spoken by the population. All these conceptions of the `speech
community' are inappropriate for capturing the ELF phenomenon. And even
the much more `open' and ¯exible speech community model suggested by Santa
Ana and Parodi (1998) is inappropriate in ELF research: their model of nested
speech-community con®gurations which consists of a multi-®eld speech community typology based on degrees of recognition of sociolinguistic norms and
characterized by speci®c linguistic variables, still suggests that speakers are
essentially placeable in a particular con®guration.
Despite their variation, all models of the speech community still have as a
common thread ± as Holmes and Meyerho€ rightly point out ± a `sense that a
speech community is a way of being' (1999: 178). It is this dependence on
essential social and/or behavioural properties which speakers can be said to
possess in a relatively stable or homogeneous way, which makes the concept of
the speech community inappropriate for the description of ELF communication,
whose characteristic it is that each individual moves in and out of a variety of
contexts, which are likely to have quite di€erent forms of participation.
Instead of basing ELF research on the notion of the speech community, we
may therefore consider another sociolinguistic concept, the concept of `community of practice'. Wenger's (1998: 76) three dimensions characterising a
community of practice: mutual engagement, a joint negotiated enterprise, and a
shared repertoire of negotiable resources, may indeed be applicable to ELF
interactions. Mutual engagement as a precondition that makes a community of
practice possible surely exists in the types of ELF interaction described above.
Further, ELF interactions are both `joint enterprises' and `negotiated enterprises'
in that participants enter into collaborative meaning negotiations. As opposed
to monolingual communities of practice, the `enterprise' in ELF talk is to
successfully negotiate on the content plane (reach a common goal) and on
the level of linguistic (English) forms. The `shared repertoire of negotiable
resources' consists of English linguistic resources, involving the joint construction of a communicative repertoire instrumental in greatly varying contexts,
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572
573
both real and in the minds of interactants. The activity-based concept of
community of practice with its di€use alliances and communities of imagination
and alignment ®ts ELF interactions well because ELF participants have heterogeneous backgrounds and diverse social and linguistic expectations. Rather
than being characterized by ®xed social categories and stable identities, ELF
users are agentively involved in the construction of event-speci®c, interactional
styles and frameworks.
3.
There is a need for radically rethinking the linguistic norm with which ELF
speakers' discourse behaviour is to be compared (cf. Seidlhofer 2001). This
norm cannot be the monolingual English native speaker, simply because ELF
speakers are by de®nition not monolingual speakers. It has long been recognized
that L2 learners, and much less so ELF users, often do not aspire to English
native speaker pragmatics as a target. They never intend to become part of any
English native speaker community just as immigrants may opt for partial or full
divergence from their host country's pragmatic norms as a strategy of L1
identity maintenance. And English native speakers may perceive non-native
speakers' total convergence as inappropriately intrusive and inconsistent with
the non-native outsider role. The yardstick for measuring ELF speakers'
performance should therefore rather be an `expert in ELF use', a stable multilingual speaker under comparable socio-cultural and historical conditions of
language use, and with comparable goals for interaction. There is some
empirical support for this stance, for example from studies of the pragmatic
behaviour of bilinguals. Studies of their requesting behaviour point to an
`intercultural style' ± a third, hybrid way developed, for example, by HebrewEnglish bilinguals (Blum-Kulka 1990), who realize requests di€erently in each
language, and who also di€er signi®cantly from monolingual speakers' performance ± but not because of lack of competence.
Rather than measuring ELF talk against an English L1 norm, one might
openly regard ELF as a hybrid language ± hybrid in the sense of Latin hibrida as
anything derived from heterogeneous sources. In literary and cultural studies,
the notion of `hybridity' has long assumed importance, for instance in the
writing of Bhabha (1994), who sees hybridity as border-crossing, taking alien
items into one's native language and culture, going against conventional rules
and standards. Also, the work of Bakhtin (1981) links hybridity to narrative
construction and dialogicity, and regards it as a procedure to create multiphone
texts made up of multiple voices showing `inner dialogicity' despite being overtly
realized in one language. These ideas are useful for conceptualising ELF. Here I
would further di€erentiate between phenotypical hybridity, where the foreign
admixture is manifest on the surface (transfer is isolable), and genotypical
hybridity, where di€erent mental lexica or, in a Whor®an way, di€erent
underlying `Weltanschauungen' and conceptual sets, may be operative in ELF
speakers. While the conventional perspective on L2 speakers is characterized by
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
HOUSE
disregarding their possession of other languages and subjecting them to L2,
perspectives on hybrid procedures aim at making or leaving recognizable those
other languages in ELF, thus celebrating the `otherness' under the surface of the
English language. This positive view of `the otherness' in ELF is of course re¯ected
in strong countercurrents of resistance and a new pride in national, regional and
local languages and language varieties. (See above, page 562, and cf. Canagarajah's 1999 plea for `appropriating discourses', for resisting and subverting
English norms such that a `pluralized English' can accommodate ELF speakers'
needs, norms and values, and see also Singh, Kell and Pandian 2002.)
5. CONCLUSION
In conceptualising and researching ELF, we need `a third way', which steers
clear of the extremes of ®ghting the spread of English for its linguistic
imperialism, and accepting it in toto for its bene®ts. Accepting hybridity and
using English creatively for one's own communicative purposes seems to be one
such `third way'. This was amply documented in the study of actual ELF talk
described above. Such a compromise `third way' for ELF had already been
suggested by Fishman 25 years ago when he called ELF an `additional language'
(1977: 329€.), a `co-language' functioning not against, but in conjunction
with, local languages. The results of our project on the in¯uence of English on
discourse norms of other languages described above, show that the massive
borrowing from English lexis is not matched with (more insidious) shifts in
discourse conventions. And ®nally, the project on the introduction of English as
a medium of instruction in German universities has shown that in tertiary
education ± one of Fishman's (1996) seven parameters of `Angli®cation' ± there
are no signs (yet) of a threat to a native language (German) and to multilingualism. Using English initially as an auxiliary language from which students
can be weaned once the national language is mastered, has proved to be a
popular model for ELF in tertiary education in Germany.
Rather than pre-determine research and emotionalise discussion through such
passe-partout derogative terms as (neo)imperialism and (neo)colonialism, and to
disqualify all arguments which do not ®t the mainstream ideological stance of
seeing English as a threat to multilingualism as politically naõÈve, I ®nd it better to
try to do more (and more varied) empirical research on how ELF is actually used
and what it does to local languages. To facilitate research we need both larger
corpora (cf. Seidhofer's 2001 VOICE initiative) and a `conceptual basis'. I have
suggested three areas where such a conceptualization might begin: language
acquisition, reference group, and linguistic norm; I have pleaded for adopting a
social (macro) view of ELF learning, adopting the concept of community of
practice, and taking hybridity as a linguistic-cultural norm. To date, surprisingly
little work has been done in the areas covered by the projects described above:
actual ELF talk; the e€ect massive global translation and multilingual text
production is having on local languages; and the use of ELF in European
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574
575
educational contexts. Much needs to be done, if research is not to lag further
behind the reality of the global use of English as a language for communication.
With reference to my limited work alone, it would seem that English as a lingua
franca is not, for the present time, a threat to multilingualism.
NOTES
1. cf. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) and their explanation of phenomena such as
openness to forms from other languages. In `di€use' linguistic situations such as the
typical ELF interaction, language mixing tends to occur more regularly and is
generally more readily tolerated.
2. In fact the notion of a `speech community' is singularly inappropriate for a
conceptualisation of ELF. See the discussion below, for instance on pages 561 and 570.
3. The epithet `instrumental' is, of course, reminiscent of Gardner and Lambert's
(1972) classic work on motivation to learn an L2 and their claim that an
individual's attitude towards the L2 and the L2 community strongly in¯uence
his/her learning behaviour. An `instrumental orientation' (as the utilitarian
counterpart to an `integrative orientation') pertains to the potential gains of being
able to communicate in an L2. I can see some conceptual anity here to a language
for communication, but ± apart from the fact that the instrumental ± integrative
dichotomy has since been heavily criticised ± ELF pertains to language use, not
language learning, and this use is not geared to a ®xed native speaker community as
the Gardner/Lambert concept implies.
4. ELF, I would hypothesize, has no `identity formatting potential' (Coupland 2001)
other than the L1s (or even other national L2s) of its speakers. These languages and
dialects, but not ELF, are important denominators of identities (cf. Bell 2001 for a
discussion of language as identity marker). With respect to Bell's (2001) two
complementary and co-existent dimensions of style, referee-design and audience
design, I would hypothesize that in ELF talk, referee-design is typically `realised' in
relation to speakers' own ingroup, but not to any anglophone referee group.
5. This is not the place to provide details about the translation theory in which these
concepts were developed. I refer the reader to House (1977, 1997) where a
functional-pragmatic theory of translation including the concept of a `cultural
®lter' is explicated, and where this ®lter is given substance through the results of
a body of contrastive English±German work in the form of a set of continua along
which German and English text producers' communicative preferences tend to vary
(cf., e.g. House 1996a).
6. The project initially investigates the in¯uence ELF has on German (later French and
Spanish) texts. Ongoing PhD work by associated project workers is also widening
this focus to Korean, Portuguese and Chinese texts.
7. A detailed description of the project and more comprehensive data analysis is given
in House (2002b).
8. All names are anonymised.
9. Transcription conventions in the data displayed are as follows:
[overlap]
overlap indicated by square brackets
(seconds)
length of pauses given in round brackets
(non-verbal behaviour) non-verbal behaviour also in round brackets
@@@
laughter
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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA
HOUSE
10. `Misunderstanding' is a complex phenomenon, and there are many di€erent and
possibly interacting reasons why misunderstandings occur. Various `types' or levels
of such `problematic talk' have been suggested (cf. Coupland, Giles and Wiemann
1991; House, Kasper and Ross 2003). In talking about misunderstandings in the
context of this paper, I refer (quite generally) to inappropriate comprehension
manifest on the linguistic surface through, for example, requests for clari®cation
or non-sequitur turn sequences.
11. cf. also Ricento (2000) and his plea for a conceptual framework linking the roles of
(agentively involved) individuals and collectivities in the process of language use,
attitudes and policies.
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Address correspondence to:
Juliane House
Institut fuer Allgemeine und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft
Hamburg University
Von-Melle-Park 6
20146 Hamburg
Germany
jhouse@uni-hamburg.de
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