juliane house - a treat to multilinguarism

7/31/2019 Juliane House - A Treat to Multilinguarism

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Journal of Sociolinguistics7/4, 2003: 556578

English as a lingua franca:

A threat to multilingualism?

Juliane HouseHamburg 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 andto multilingualism. I support this argument by making a distinction between`languages for communication' and `languages for identication'. Furthersupport for the stance against one-sidedly attacking English as a killer languagewill be drawn from the ndings of three research projects currently beingcarried out at Hamburg University, one on the impact English has on discoursenorms in inuential 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 researchparadigm for English as a lingua franca.

KEYWORDS: English as lingua franca, language for com-munication, language for identication, covert translation, socialmacro-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 andelsewhere, and develop an argument against it. I support this argumentby making a distinction between `languages for communication' and`languages for identication' and by drawing on the ndings of threeresearch projects currently being carried out at Hamburg University. Inconclusion, I make some suggestions for a new research paradigm forEnglish as a lingua franca (ELF), which may more adequately handle theimpact 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, andwhat relevant research exists on ELF interactions.


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ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA 557

1. WHAT IS A LINGUA FRANCA? DEFINITIONS AND STATE OF THEART IN LINGUA FRANCA RESEARCH

In its original meaning, a lingua franca the term comes from Arabic `lisan-al-farang' was simply an intermediary language used by speakers of Arabic withtravellers from Western Europe. Its meaning was later extended to describe alanguage of commerce, a rather stable variety with little room for individualvariation. This meaning is clearly not applicable to today's global English,whose major characteristics are its functional exibility and its spread acrossmany di erent domains. These two features have led to another new and indeedremarkable feature: that the number of non-native speakers is substantiallylarger than its native speakers (the relationship is about four to one, cf. Graddol1997). English is thus no longer òwned' by its native speakers, and there is astrong tendency towards more rapid `de-owning' not least because of theincreasing frequency with which non-native speakers use ELF in internationalcontacts.

But exactly how does ELF di er from native English? Is it a language forspecic purposes, a pidgin, or is it a particular type of interlanguage? Clearly,ELF is neither a language for specic purposes nor a pidgin, because it is not arestricted code, but a language showing full linguistic and functional range(Kachru 1997) and serving as a `contact language between persons who shareneither a common native tongue nor a common national culture, and for whomEnglish is the chosen foreign language of communication' (Firth 1996: 240).

In an attempt to dene a lingua franca from a formal perspective, GramkowAndersen (1993) o ers a denition that characterizes ELF in the following way:`There is no consistency in form that goes beyond the participant level, i.e., eachcombination of interactants seems to negotiate and govern their own variety of lingua franca use in terms of prociency level, use of code-mixing, degree of pidginization, etc.' (Gramkow Andersen 1993: 108). Here we have the mostimportant ingredients of a lingua franca: negotiability, variability in terms of speaker prociency, and openness to an integration of forms of other lan-guages. 1 All this reminds one, of course, of an ìnterlanguage': a concept rstintroduced by Selinker as `the observable output resulting from a speaker'sattempt to produce a foreign norm, i.e., both his errors and non-errors. It isassumed that such behaviour is highly structured . . . and that it must be dealtwith as a system, not as an isolated collection of errors' (Selinker 1969: fn. 5).

The salient concepts here are `foreign norm', èrrors', `non-errors', `system'and, by implication, `the native speaker' (whose competence is the yardstick fordeviations from a norm and for system-errors). It is vis-a -vis these concepts thatthe di erential approach to ELF can now be outlined: rst, ELF talk cannot beconceived with a view to an ideal English norm, and the ELF speaker cannot bemeasured in his/her competence vis-a -vis `the native speaker'. A lingua franca


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psycholinguistic ìn between-system' developing inside a speaker on his/her wayto full mastery of the English language system; that is, the perspective is not onewith a view to development towards becoming a `proper member' of anotherspeech community. 2

More adequate for ELF than the interlanguage framework is the multilingualspeaker possessing what Cook (1993) has called `multicompetence', that is, adistinctive state of mind, unlike a nal stage of knowledge like the nativemonolingual's competence. The focus is here on the possession of more thanone set of linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge in one and the sameindividual, on language use rather than on development and acquisition, andon the socio-pragmatic functions of language choice. To be fair, Selinker(1992), when he `re-discovered' interlanguage twenty years later, mentionedthe issue of `World Englishes' characterizing these varieties in terms of `fossilization' on a cline to nativisation, and in terms of cultural and contextualtransfer, but he also pointed to the need to discover `non-native varieties of theinternational language English'.

From the perspective of pragmatics and discourse studies, ELF discourse asone type of non-nativenon-native interaction has been examined with a focuson how meaning is negotiated with the help of those unstable and varyingresources available to ELF interactants. This interactional approach is con-cerned with social rather than individual psychological phenomena, and itfocuses on language use. The lingua franca concept is useful particularly whencontrasted with the more ideologically fused cognates such as `foreigner talk' or`learner interaction', because one here àttempts to conceptualize the partici-pant simply as a language user whose real-world interactions are deserving of unprejudiced description rather than as a person conceived apriori to be thepossessor of incomplete or decient communicative competence, putativelystriving for the `target' competence of an idealized `native speaker' (Firth1996: 241).

One of the few empirical studies on ELF talk was conducted by Firth (1996)and his associates. They analysed ELF telephone conversations between employ-ees of Danish companies and their foreign partners supplementing theiranalyses with ethnographic information. In their ndings, the authors stressabove all the èeting' nature of ELF talk, the uidity of norms reectingparticipants' insecurity regarding which norms are operative. They also pointto ELF interactants' attempts to `normalize' potential trouble sources, ratherthan attend to them explicitly via repair initiation, reformulation, etc. As long asa certain threshold of understanding is achieved, ELF participants appear toadopt a principle of `Let it pass', an interpretive procedure which makes theinteractional style both `robust' and explicitly consensual. While one mightassume that such a procedure endangers e ective communication, as thesupercial consensus may well mask deeper sources of trouble arising out of


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over' on the common sense assumption that it will either eventually becomeclear or end up as redundant. The robustness of the talk is strengthened by aremarkable number of joint discourse productions. All these strategies seem toshow 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 ina British student residence from subjects of many di erent L1 backgrounds.Meierkord compared the structural characteristics of her ELF data with relevantndings from the literature on nativenative and nativenon-native talk. Shefound that ELF users employed a reduced repertoire of tokens, used shorterturns and much more non-verbal communication in comparison to her nativeEnglish sample. But, like Firth, she also established in her analyses a certain`robustness' of the ELF talk.

More recently, Lesznya k (2002) analysed an ELF interaction at an inter-national students' meeting in the Netherlands, comparing it with equivalentbaseline interactions by groups of native speakers of English, Hungarian andGerman, and an interaction between English native speakers and speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL). She found that ELF users (as opposed to EFLspeakers) seemed to follow a dynamic model of topic management, and engagedin a process of gradually nding common ground, of negotiating footing andcommunicative rules such that their initially divergent (`chaotic') behaviourbecame consensually transformed into convergent behavioural patterns. ELFinteractants in Lesznya k's data work out the rules for their particular encounterzeroing in on a shared interpretation of the social situation they are ndingthemselves in.

In sum then, ELF appears to be neither a restricted language for specialpurposes, nor a pidgin, nor an interlanguage, but one of a repertoire of di erentcommunicative instruments an individual has at his/her disposal, a useful andversatile tool, a `language for communication'. As such it can be distinguishedfrom those other parts of the individual's repertoire which serve as `language(s)for identication' (Hullen 1992). In the following section I will elaborate on thisdistinction which is a functional one, and is in line with my view of language asa means to full certain functions in human experience a view uniting bothcognitive-individual and social foci on language.

2. LANGUAGES FOR COMMUNICATION VERSUS LANGUAGES FORIDENTIFICATION: SOME SOCIO-POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS

ELF can be regarded as a language for communication, that is, a usefulinstrument for making oneself understood in international encounters. It isinstrumental in enabling communication with others who do not speak one's


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using ELF, speakers are unlikely to conceive of it as a `language for identica-tion': it is local languages, and particularly an individual's L1(s), which arelikely to be the main determinants of identity, which means holding a stake inthe collective linguistic-cultural capital that denes the L1 group and itsmembers. Kramsch (2002) gives a beautiful example of the distinction betweenusing language for communicative purposes and using it for identicatorypurposes, and the type of a ective-emotive quality involved in identication.She quotes from an autobiography of a speaker of Vietnamese as L1: Às forEnglish I do speak the language but I don't think I'll ever talk it. English owsfrom the mind to the tongue and then to the pages of books . . . I only talkVietnamese. 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 givinglife to the landscape in her path. It rises to my mind along the vivid images of mygrandmother's house and my grandmother . . .'(Kramsch 2002: 9899).

Linguistically determined identity need not be unitary and xed, but can bemulti-faceted, non-unitary and contradictory (Norton 2000), when an indi-vidual 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 usableneither for identity marking, nor for a positive (ìntegrative') disposition towardan L2 group, nor for a desire to become similar to valued members of this L2group simply because there is no denable group of ELF speakers. 4 ELF users,then, use ELF as a transactional language for their own communicativepurposes and advantage. Such a largely utilitarian motive seems to me to beincompatible with viewing ELF users as I take, for example, Phillipson (1992)to do as `pawns' in an imperialistic game, where formerly militaristic andcolonial inroads are now linguistically replayed. There is a sad truth behind deSwaan's (2001) assessment of the (politically correct) ght against `linguisticimperialism', `linguicism' and the proclamation of everybody's right to speakthe language of their choice. Àlas', 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 haveto (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 orlocal languages, as they are used for di erent purposes. As Bisong (1995) pointsout with reference to Nigeria, English performs a useful function in thismultilingual society, and it is no longer perceived as an ìmperial language'to be learnt at all costs. In Nigeria, English has become one of the languagesavailable for use, and it is its communication potential which makes peopledecide to use English. Arguments such as the ones brought forward by


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refer to the case of my native Germany where English in its role as a languagewith a `high communication value' was welcomed by many after World War II,not least because of its (maybe na ve) association with democratic statehood. InWest Germany, English was embraced wholeheartedly as a means of helpingpeople forget the past. A similar process is currently taking place in EasternEurope, where English is welcomed as an auxiliary language and as a means todiscard Russian, which had been imposed, but eventually failed, as a languageof inter-state communication. Clashes and conicts of loyalty between nativelanguages and Russian often occurred in the former Soviet Union. The fearfuelled by some that a hegemonic language would squash native languages wastherefore 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 membersof minority languages to insist on their own local language for emotionalbinding to their own culture, history and tradition, and there is, indeed, a strongcountercurrent to the spread of ELF in that local varieties and cultural practicesare often strengthened. One example is the revival of German language folkmusic, songs in local dialects such as Bavarian to counteract pop music inEnglish only. Using ELF as a medium of border-crossing to set up as many expertcommunities as necessary in science, economics, education, etc. cannot be seenas encroaching on established `roots'.

As has happened in many parts of the world before, a diglossia situation isnow developing in Europe English for various `pockets of expertise' and non-private communication on the one hand, and national and local varieties fora ective, identicatory purposes on the other hand. As a language with a highcommunicative value, ELF has naturally acquired a special status in theEuropean Union (EU) that sets it o from all other EU languages. But thisstatus has been consistently tabooed. In the absence of any explicit EU languagepolicy, a `mute immobility in matters of language prepares the ground for astampede towards English' (de Swaan 2001: 171). It is also an open secret thatthe EU's supposedly humane multilingualism is but an illusion. Firstly, the EUrecognizes one and only one o cial language for every member state, a positionat 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 languagesin the EU are (and have always been) more equal than others: from the outset,French, supported by an aggressive language policy, has held a singularlyprivileged position as the only o cial language of the EU's precursor, and as animportant language spoken in all three major EU domiciles. Since the Frenchprivilege is now being threatened, there is a erce rivalry between French andEnglish, 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


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once there are 27 or more member states. In Koskinen's (2000) insiderexperience, 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 itdoes. According to Koskinen, translators often suspect that no one ever readstheir 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 thetranslations' accuracy and openly prefer to read the more reliable English (andFrench) originals. Another curious feature of EU translations is that they areoften 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 betaken account of in a process of `cultural ltering' (House 1997).

The EU's ostensible multilingualism (and its particularly strong resistance toadopting 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 theo cial languages of the member states have been given equal status. With theincreased number of member states, this policy is a serious problem, a problemwhich could be solved by adopting ELF for the EU. Once the position of Englishas the vehicular language were recognized, resources would be freed forsupporting all other European languages. ELF would need to be taughtintensively and early on as a true second language. More money and timecould then be allotted for teaching and otherwise supporting other Europeanlanguages (especially minority languages) in a exible fashion, tailor-made toregionally and locally di ering needs. If one makes the distinction betweenlanguages for communication, such as English today, and languages foridentication mother tongues, regional, local, intimate varieties of language ELF need not be a threat. It can be seen as strengthening the complementaryneed for native local languages that are rooted in their speakers' shared history,cultural tradition, practices, conventions, and values as identicatory potential.To support this argument as well as the line of argumentation followedthroughout this section, there follows a brief outline of three empirical researchprojects 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


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decades, a massive inux of English words and collocations into many otherlanguages. However annoying this is for the purists, these lexical loans anddirect translations, which are most conspicuous in domains such as media,advertising, life style, youth culture etc., might be brushed o as ònly' a ectingthe òpen system' of lexis leaving the `heart of a language', its structure, intact.In Germany, for instance, most people are used to hearing strange new routinessuch as `Lass mich allein' (Leave me alone) instead of the conventional `Lassmich in Ruh'. And although Germans are faced with a growing number of crude direct translations such as `Hartwarenhaus' (Hardware store), an alienword in German, and innumerable English lexical items in German texts like`department', `share holder value', etc., such English inserts are probably astransient as they are innocuous. But what about the more hidden, but never-theless much more serious inuence of the English language on textual normsin other languages? In a research project currently conducted at HamburgUniversity and funded by the German Science Foundation at its Centre onMultilingualism (cf. House 2002a), this very question is being investigated:whether and how ELF inuences textual norms in covert translation and paralleltext production. In a covert translation, the function the source text has in itslocal source language context is maintained, and this maintenance is achievedthrough the use of a `cultural lter' with which culture-specic textual norms inthe source language community are adapted to conventional norms in the`receiving' language community. 5 Given the ubiquity of ELF, this adaptationprocess may now be in a process of change. We therefore ask whether cross-cultural di erence in textualisation conventions gives way to similarity in theseconventions, and whether a process is underway which may eventually resultin cross-culturally similar processes of text production. The global hypothesisunderlying this project is therefore that German (French, Spanish, etc.) 6 textualnorms are adapted to anglophone ones. These adaptations can be located alongparameters of culturally determined communicative preferences such as pre-ferred foci on the interpersonal or the ideational function, and on informationalvagueness or specicity as they have emerged from my own GermanEnglishcontrastive work (e.g. House 2003) and many other comparative studies (e.g.Clyne 1987). Parametrical changes may also entail ànglicisation' in terms of information structure or word order, for example. Concretely, we have set upseveral working hypotheses referring to a shift from a conventionally strong`content-orientation' and informational explicitness of German texts to ananglophone àddressee orientation', inference-inducing implicitness and propo-sitional opaqueness. The work also considers shifts in information structurefrom packing lexical information integratively and hierarchically to presentinginformation in a more loosely linear, `sentential' way.

These hypotheses are tested using a dynamic, implicitly diachronic transla-tion and parallel text corpus of some 500 texts (with a core corpus consisting of


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globalized companies; popular science; and computer texts. It is made up of three parts: a primary corpus comprising original English texts and theirpublished translations into German; a parallel corpus comprising authentic(i.e. non-translated) texts in English and other relevant languages from thesame three genres; and a validation corpus holding translations from the samethree genres in the òpposite direction', that is, from German etc. into English. Italso has interviews with translators, editors, writers and other persons involvedin text production and reception. To further enrich our analyses we havecollected English and German texts similar in topic orientation which haveappeared in the recently established parallel editions of newspapers, such as theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung/ International Herald Tribune .

We have so far followed a case study approach involving in-depth analysisand comparison of textual exemplars, that is, English source texts and Germantranslations as well as pairs of parallel texts. The analyses follow House'stranslation model (1997), which is based on Hallidayan systemic-functionaltheory, register linguistics, discourse analysis and text linguistics. They arecarried out both from a micro- and a macro-perspective, and their ultimate goalis to reconstruct (and compare) the types of motivated choices text producersmade in order to create this, and only this, text for a particular e ect, aparticular audience, in particular `contexts of situation', and to establish theextent to which `cultural ltering' has taken place.

Tentative results of the analyses of some 60 English and German transla-tional pairs and parallel texts as well as some 15 interviews show that ourhypothesis is basically not conrmed. Widespread borrowing of English lexicalitems and routines is not accompanied by changes in the make-up of Germantexts: German and English texts di er in their ìnterpersonal' orientation (orìnvolvement' in the sense of Biber 1988) as they did 30 years ago (House1977). In German texts, àddressee orientation' still functions di erently fromthe way it does in anglophone texts. There is, for instance, a preference for a`didactic manner of information presentation' in the German texts with frequentelaboration of information. Consider the following extracts from the journalScientic Americanand its German satellite publication Spektrum der Wissen-schaft. (I have provided English glosses (back translations, BT) of the Germantranslation to ease comprehension.) The German translations in Spektrum der Wissenschaft were produced by in-house translators.

Excerpt 1M. Gazzaniga `The split brain revisited' ( Scientic AmericanJuly 1998)

`Rechtes und linkes Gehirn: Split-Brain und Bewutsein' ( Spektrumder Wissenschaft Dezember 1998)

(BT: Right and left brain: Split-brain and consciousness)1 Groundbreaking work that began more than a quarter of a century ago has led


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2 Grohirnhalften haben das Verstandnis fur den funktionellen Aufbau des3 Gehirns und das Wesen des Bewutseins vertieft.(BT: Decade-long studies on patients with surgically separated brain hemisphereshave 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 contentby pre-empting imaginary reader questions about specic circumstantialelements of extent, location in time and place, manner, etc. The English textshows a tendency towards `genre mixing', that is, using mechanisms whichreaders know from journalism, advertising, sermons and other persuasivelyoriented genres. The e ect of this hybridisation can be seen in overt àddresseeinvolvement', and the creation of `human interest' by drawing readers into theinstitutional context in which the writer operates thus o ering readers possibil-ities of identication. In the English popular science texts, this is often achievedthrough 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 replicatedin the German translation. Consider Excerpt 2:

Excerpt 2S. Buchbinder Àvoiding infection after HIV exposure' ( Scientic American July

1998)`Pravention nach HIV-Kontakt' ( Spektrum der Wissenschaft Oktober1998)(BT: Prevention after HIV-contact)

1 Suppose you are a doctor in an emergency room2 and a patient tells you she was raped two hours earlier.3 She is afraid she may have been exposed to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS4 but has heard that there is a `morning-after pill' to prevent HIV infection.5 Can you in fact do anything to block the virus6 from replicating and establishing infection?

1 In der Notfallaufnahme eines Krankenhauses berichtet eine Patientin

2 sie sei vor zwei Stunden vergewaltigt worden3 und nun in Sorge, dem AIDS-Erreger ausgesetzt zu sein,4 sie habe aber gehort, es gebe eine `Pille danach',5 die eine HIV-Infektion verhute.6 Kann der Arzt uberhaupt irgendetwas tun,7 was eventuell vorhandene Viren hindern wurde,8 sich zu vermehren und sich dauerhaft im Korper einzunisten?(BT: In the emergency room of a hospital a patient reports that she had been rapedtwo hours ago and was now worrying that she had been exposed to the AIDS-virus.She said she had heard that there was an àfter-pill', which might prevent an

HIV-infection. Can the doctor in fact do anything which might prevent potentiallyexisting virusses from replicating and establishing themselves permanently in theb d ?)


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strategies of addressee-involvement in the English text, as well as o ers to theaddressees to identify themselves with agents in the text (lines 1 and 5) are notreplicated in German, that is, German generic conventions are upheld. Thatthis `resistance' is a conscious one, was documented in the interviews withtranslators and editors: the tendency towards `humanising' textual material inEnglish popular science texts (via framing techniques, personal deixis, moodswitches, etc.) is consciously shunned in favour of a more `rational', more`scientic' (`more German') character of texts in this genre, then and now deeplyanchored in cultural tradition.

Our ndings in this project show that the types of pragmatic shift or `culturalltering' conventionally undertaken as texts travel through time and space areexactly what they were before. There are no changes in addressee-orientation,no modications along those parameters of cultural di erence which I hypo-thesized on the basis of contrastive work. German discourse norms, and, judgingby the few analyses of translations from English into French, Spanish andPortuguese we conducted, also local discourse norms in other Europeanlanguages, remain uninuenced by ELF. However, preliminary analyses of most recent textual specimens do seem to point to a change in the expressionof `subjectivity' and `stance', addressee-orientation and genre mixing. But,before we are justied in speaking of a `trend change', much more quantitative,diachronic corpus research is necessary. This will be the next step in thisproject.

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 speakersof di erent L1s. We have collected data from international students at HamburgUniversity (age 2535), from many di erent L1 backgrounds, who were askedto interact amongst themselves and with members of the support sta of Hamburg University. The data was elicited in a mixture of authentic andsimulated ELF interactions as well as in more experimental set-ups. It contains:(1) ELF interactions (groups of 4 international students); (2) comparable nativeEnglish interactions (groups of 4 L1 English speakers); (3) comparable ELFinteractions (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). Participantswere 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, theywere given an article from a German weekly on the role of ELF. The interactionwas taped and transcribed, and each of the four participants was asked to give


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preceding analysis those parts of the interaction that pointed to imminentinteractional trouble. The analysis was conducted on the basis of a model of spoken discourse and the analytic categories provided therein (Edmondson1981; Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). 9

The following trends of ELF discourse behaviour have emerged from both theanalysis and the post hoc interviews. In line with the literature discussed above,we found remarkably few misunderstandings 10 and a concomitant multitude of `Let it pass'. As opposed to the many misunderstandings I detected in myanalyses of nativenon-native talk (e.g. see House 2003), this ELF talk seems tobe qualitatively di erent in nature. This impression is based on three specicndings:

Finding one. Although interactants seem to transfer foreign (L1) conventionsinto the ELF discourse, this does not lead to misunderstandings. For instance,the three Asian participants employ topic management strategies in a strikingway, recycling a specic topic regardless of where and how the discourse haddeveloped at any particular point. This behaviour makes the entire interactionresemble a set of parallel monologues with each participant following his/herown 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 exemplies the `monologic tracks' followed by the Asian students. (Ihave included the previous speaker's turn, so as to better show the type of non-sequitur that occurs due to interactants' insistence in pulling the conversationtowards their particular pet topic.) Mauri's topic or leitmotif is `business' (half of Mauri's 24 turns are devoted to this topic):

Excerpt 3Wei: They don't have tradition to learn sorry to learn German perhaps Japanese a

little bit tradition @ but not GermanMauri: 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 tolearn this language because all the people use this language if you cannotspeak in this language you lost and you have to so I think it's begins ermof course with the colonialism I think too because the history of thisdevelopment how the language in very early period

Joy: Yes I think so and non-native norms because there are (2 sec) a lot of normslanguage norms and I think it's very di cult in reality to understand peoplefrom the other countries other culture backgrounds

Mauri: 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) getwith this development I think so if you just use this language English asbusiness language


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single-minded pursuance of Mauri's individual script. Although I do not speakof the L1s involved and have not collected relevant baseline data and cannotpretend to have conducted even a rudimentary contrastive analysis, I do haveparticipants' retrospective subjective interpretations and metapragmatic assess-ments. Relevant here is Mauri's comment. He suggested that his topic recyclingmay stem from transfer of native Indonesian conventions of discourse con-struction in which topics are cyclically re-introduced, very much in the wayKaplan (1966) suggests in his much-maligned `Doodles' article. Joy alsoconrmed this explanation of the culturally determined topic management inthis data.

Finding two. A second nding in this data refers to the remarkably frequent useof a particular discourse marker: the Represent (Edmondson 1981). It is used, asits name suggests, to `re-present' the previous speaker's move in order to aid thepresent speaker's working memory in both his/her comprehension and pro-duction processes, to provide textual coherence, to signal uptake, to requestconrmation, or to indicate to the previous speaker that there is no intentionto `steal' his/her turn. Represents, also known in the literature as `echoing',`mirroring', or `shadowing' devices, occur in many di erent genres such astherapeutic interviews, educational talk and aviation control discourse. Theyare multifunctional discourse lubricants, acting simultaneously as an encapsu-lation of previously given information and as a new instantiation creatinglinkage across turns through redundancy and the construction of lexicalparadigmatic clusters. But Represents can also act as meta-communicative procedures and as such serve to reinforce metalinguistic awareness in partici-pants a very useful function in ELF talk given the linguistic fragility of thisgenotypically multilingual discourse. Consider Excerpts 4 and 5:

Excerpt 4Brit: And if erm things like Nigerian English, Indian English which is a sort of

variety in itself it should be respected

Mauri: Should be respectedExcerpt 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 onlystem from interactants' attempt to support their own working memory andfacilitate processing, but may also be a sign of `Asian politeness', where anexplicitly verbalised acknowledgement of the interlocutor's message counts aspart of being polite. Wei contradicted this view stating that he used repetition to


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answers to particular questions. In order to assess the validity of these di erentinterpretations of the functions of Represents in this data, analyses of a largercorpus are clearly needed. At the present time, no conclusive answer can begiven.

Finding three. We also found a strong demonstration of solidarity andconsensus-orientation in this data, especially on the part of the Asianparticipants who, despite their mono-thematic monologues, also manage tocooperate, and co-construct utterances in a display of solidarity the solidarityof non-native ELF speakers. Consider Excerpt 6:

Excerpt 6Mauri: 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 basisMauri: Yes Joy: To be a world languageMauri: Yes

Such collaborative discourse production as evident in Excerpt 6 is so frequent inmy data that it may well be its most important feature. Interestingly, it is onlyBrit, the German speaker, who tried to pierce the bubble of apparent mutualintelligibility and overt collaboration. In her interview, Brit stated she had feltthere was a certain `Asian style' of consensus-orientation, that is, a tendency toignore potentially troublesome remarks, and to resist argumentative talk inwhich interactants' moves might be challenged. Brit was particularly struck bythe fact that her (provocative) questions were simply not answered! The fact thatBrit longed for more argumentative talk can also be taken as conrming transferof her German interactional preferences preferences hypothesized in a series of contrastive GermanEnglish pragmatic analyses (see above p. 564), one of themreferring to a particular emphasis on transactional versus phatic talk.

The consensus orientation evident in Asian students' discourse behaviour inthis ELF data could be interpreted with reference to Tajfel's (1981) assumptionof a continuum of interpersonal and group identity, such that one might posit afocus on group identity. However, the individualgroup dichotomy may be toosimplistic: speakers of L1s such as Korean, German, Indonesian and Chinese inmy data are, when using ELF, individuals who tend to transfer their L1discourse conventions into their ELF talk while at the same time constructingsomething as uid and immaterial as the `community of ELF speakers', aconsortium that is always constituted anew in any ongoing talk.

In sum then and despite the di culty of separating ELF speakers' L1 transferfrom their restricted ELF competences I would hypothesize rstly that ELF


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resulting diversity of `voices' in the medium of English, or maybe because usinga 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' (House1996b), their strategic competence is arguably intact, and it is this strategiccompetence which enables ELF speakers to engage in meaningful negotiation.

3.3 The project Ènglish as a medium of instruction in German universities'

In this project recently started at Hamburg University (Motz in press), we areinvestigating how English, now increasingly used as a medium of instruction inGerman universities, interacts with the domestic German language, and howinternational students perceive, and react to, this `diglossic situation'. Thebackground for this research is the unprecedented case in German societythat national universities are instituting courses of study which no longer useGerman as the language of instruction. Using English in tertiary education is, of course, one important dimension of ànglication'. While ELF in tertiaryeducation is common in former British and American colonies and their spheresof inuence (Fishman 1996: 637), there is now a new trend of also using ELF inEuropean tertiary education. In the German context, this is rstly a reection of the generally balanced attitude of the German intellectual e lite towards ELF(Ammon 2001), which is of course in stark contrast to the French e lite's view of ELF (Flaitz 1988). Secondly, it is a result of German universities' attempt tointernationalise German universities and attract more (paying!) foreign stu-dents, whose number has been steadily decreasing. Universities have recentlyreacted to this attrition by introducing ìnternational degree programmes',where English is either the sole medium of instruction or is used alongsideGerman, 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 theacademic environment while German is used in everyday life, a ects students'motivation to study, their actual use of either language and their view of thissituation. Data has been collected inside a Master of European Studiesprogramme and consists of several parts: (1) relevant background documents;(2) observations of instruction followed by retrospective interviews; (3) inter-views with international students eliciting self-assessments of previous languagelearning experience and the `two languages situation'; (4) diary studies with asmall sample of students; and (5) students' self-taped authentic everydayinteractions with di erent German interlocutors.

Preliminary results of the analyses of this data suggest that students preferinitial instruction in Ènglish only' followed by a gradual progression to Germanas the medium of instruction, if and when their competence in German allowsfor such a transition. Students' self-assessments of their needs and perceptions of


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from ELF to German is now also o cially favoured. As opposed to Ènglishonly' programmes, such a progression helps increase the attractiveness of thenational language both as an academic medium and a tool for surviving ineveryday German life. The interviews reveal that English is seen by teachers andstudents both as a useful means of easing communication in initial stages andas a useful (permanent) stand-by for solving potential communication prob-lems. English is not really seen as being in competition to German; it is describedas à class of its own', a supranational, auxiliary means of communication.

To sum up, all three research projects cannot be interpreted as indicating thatthere is a serious encroachment of ELF upon a native language: in translationand parallel text production, native norms are upheld; ELF interactions showphenotypical (and maybe genotypical) L1 presence; and, in English-mediuminstruction, 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 languagefor communication. Below, I make some suggestions for a new researchparadigm. They derive, either directly or indirectly, from the results of thework described above and the assessment of the role of ELF given in the rst partof this paper.

4. ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: TOWARDS A NEW RESEARCHPARADIGM

There are three signicant points:

1.Instead of being caught in the tunnel vision of looking at ELF inside theinterlanguage framework, which focuses on learners' decits in native speakercompetence, 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 acquisitionand 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 notcoming from native speakers but from a group of speakers who can becharacterized as sharing a multilingual habitus and multilingual commun-icative competence. Models of language learning and use which stress theimportance of social processes a ecting individuals are in line with earlyRussian theories of language learning and use as suggested by Galperin(1980). In his cultural-historical ìnteriorisation theory', psycholinguisticprocesses develop in the interaction of the individual with other speakers indi 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


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2.Rejecting the venerable psycholinguistic concept of an ìnterlanguage' as a basisfor conceptualizing ELF nds its parallel in the rejection of the establishedsociolinguistic concept of the `speech community' in its various senses: fromFishman's view that a `speech community (a term probably translated from theGerman Sprachgemeinschaft) is one, all of whose members share at least onesingle speech variety and the norms for its appropriate use' (1971: 232) aview basically shared by Hymes (1972: 53); to Labov's (1972: 120) interpreta-tion 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; toKerswill (1993), who added the criteria of the speaker's nativeness inside aspeech community and the closely related nature, at all linguistic levels, of thelanguage spoken by the population. All these conceptions of the `speechcommunity' are inappropriate for capturing the ELF phenomenon. And eventhe much more òpen' and exible speech community model suggested by SantaAna and Parodi (1998) is inappropriate in ELF research: their model of nestedspeech-community congurations which consists of a multi-eld speech com-munity typology based on degrees of recognition of sociolinguistic norms andcharacterized by specic linguistic variables, still suggests that speakers areessentially placeable in a particular conguration.

Despite their variation, all models of the speech community still have as acommon thread as Holmes and Meyerho rightly point out a `sense that aspeech community is a way of being' (1999: 178). It is this dependence onessential social and/or behavioural properties which speakers can be said topossess 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, wemay therefore consider another sociolinguistic concept, the concept of `com-munity of practice'. Wenger's (1998: 76) three dimensions characterising acommunity of practice: mutual engagement, a joint negotiated enterprise, and ashared repertoire of negotiable resources, may indeed be applicable to ELFinteractions. 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 opposedto monolingual communities of practice, the ènterprise' in ELF talk is tosuccessfully negotiate on the content plane (reach a common goal) and onthe level of linguistic (English) forms. The `shared repertoire of negotiable


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both real and in the minds of interactants. The activity-based concept of community of practice with its di use alliances and communities of imaginationand alignment ts ELF interactions well because ELF participants have hetero-geneous backgrounds and diverse social and linguistic expectations. Ratherthan being characterized by xed social categories and stable identities, ELFusers are agentively involved in the construction of event-specic, interactionalstyles and frameworks.

3.There is a need for radically rethinking the linguistic norm with which ELFspeakers' discourse behaviour is to be compared (cf. Seidlhofer 2001). Thisnorm cannot be the monolingual English native speaker, simply because ELFspeakers are by denition not monolingual speakers. It has long been recognizedthat L2 learners, and much less so ELF users, often do not aspire to Englishnative speaker pragmatics as a target. They never intend to become part of anyEnglish native speaker community just as immigrants may opt for partial or fulldivergence from their host country's pragmatic norms as a strategy of L1identity maintenance. And English native speakers may perceive non-nativespeakers' total convergence as inappropriately intrusive and inconsistent withthe non-native outsider role. The yardstick for measuring ELF speakers'performance should therefore rather be an èxpert in ELF use', a stable multi-lingual speaker under comparable socio-cultural and historical conditions of language use, and with comparable goals for interaction. There is someempirical support for this stance, for example from studies of the pragmaticbehaviour of bilinguals. Studies of their requesting behaviour point to anìntercultural style' a third, hybrid way developed, for example, by Hebrew-English bilinguals (Blum-Kulka 1990), who realize requests di erently in eachlanguage, and who also di er signicantly from monolingual speakers' perform-ance but not because of lack of competence.

Rather than measuring ELF talk against an English L1 norm, one mightopenly regard ELF as a hybrid language hybrid in the sense of Latin hibrida asanything derived from heterogeneous sources. In literary and cultural studies,the notion of `hybridity' has long assumed importance, for instance in thewriting of Bhabha (1994), who sees hybridity as border-crossing, taking alienitems into one's native language and culture, going against conventional rulesand standards. Also, the work of Bakhtin (1981) links hybridity to narrativeconstruction and dialogicity, and regards it as a procedure to create multiphonetexts made up of multiple voices showing ìnner dialogicity' despite being overtlyrealized in one language. These ideas are useful for conceptualising ELF. Here Iwould further di erentiate between phenotypical hybridity, where the foreignadmixture is manifest on the surface (transfer is isolable), and genotypicalhybridity, where di erent mental lexica or, in a Whoran way, di erent


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disregarding their possession of other languages and subjecting them to L2,perspectives on hybrid procedures aim at making or leaving recognizable thoseother languages in ELF, thus celebrating the òtherness' under the surface of theEnglish language. This positive view of `the otherness' in ELF is of course reectedin strong countercurrents of resistance and a new pride in national, regional andlocal languages and language varieties. (See above, page 562, and cf. Canagar-ajah's 1999 plea for àppropriating discourses', for resisting and subvertingEnglish 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 à third way', which steersclear of the extremes of ghting the spread of English for its linguisticimperialism, and accepting it in toto for its benets. Accepting hybridity andusing English creatively for one's own communicative purposes seems to be onesuch `third way'. This was amply documented in the study of actual ELF talkdescribed above. Such a compromise `third way' for ELF had already beensuggested by Fishman 25 years ago when he called ELF an àdditional language'(1977: 329 .), a `co-language' functioning not against, but in conjunctionwith, local languages. The results of our project on the inuence of English ondiscourse norms of other languages described above, show that the massiveborrowing from English lexis is not matched with (more insidious) shifts indiscourse conventions. And nally, the project on the introduction of English asa medium of instruction in German universities has shown that in tertiaryeducation one of Fishman's (1996) seven parameters of Ànglication' thereare no signs (yet) of a threat to a native language (German) and to multi-lingualism. Using English initially as an auxiliary language from which studentscan be weaned once the national language is mastered, has proved to be apopular model for ELF in tertiary education in Germany.

Rather than pre-determine research andemotionalise discussion through such passe-partout derogative terms as (neo)imperialism and (neo)colonialism, and todisqualify all arguments which do not t the mainstream ideological stance of seeing English as a threat to multilingualism as politically na ve, I nd it better totry to do more (and more varied) empirical research on how ELF is actually usedand what it does to local languages. To facilitate research we need both largercorpora (cf. Seidhofer's 2001 VOICE initiative) and a `conceptual basis'. I havesuggested three areas where such a conceptualization might begin: languageacquisition, reference group, and linguistic norm; I have pleaded for adopting asocial (macro) view of ELF learning, adopting the concept of community of practice, and taking hybridity as a linguistic-cultural norm. To date, surprisinglylittle work has been done in the areas covered by the projects described above:


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educational contexts. Much needs to be done, if research is not to lag furtherbehind 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 linguafranca 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 asopenness to forms from other languages. In `di use' linguistic situations such as thetypical ELF interaction, language mixing tends to occur more regularly and isgenerally more readily tolerated.

2. In fact the notion of a `speech community' is singularly inappropriate for aconceptualisation ofELF. See the discussion below, for instance onpages 561 and 570.

3. The epithet ìnstrumental' is, of course, reminiscent of Gardner and Lambert's(1972) classic work on motivation to learn an L2 and their claim that anindividual's attitude towards the L2 and the L2 community strongly inuencehis/her learning behaviour. An ìnstrumental orientation' (as the utilitariancounterpart to an ìntegrative orientation') pertains to the potential gains of beingable to communicate in an L2. I can see some conceptual a nity here to a languagefor communication, but apart from the fact that the instrumental integrativedichotomy has since been heavily criticised ELF pertains to language use, notlanguage learning, and this use is not geared to a xed native speaker community asthe Gardner/Lambert concept implies.

4. ELF, I would hypothesize, has no ìdentity formatting potential' (Coupland 2001)other than the L1s (or even other national L2s) of its speakers. These languages anddialects, but not ELF, are important denominators of identities (cf. Bell 2001 for adiscussion of language as identity marker). With respect to Bell's (2001) twocomplementary and co-existent dimensions of style, referee-design and audiencedesign, I would hypothesize that in ELF talk, referee-design is typically `realised' inrelation 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 theseconcepts were developed. I refer the reader to House (1977, 1997) where afunctional-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 EnglishGerman work in the form of a set of continua alongwhich German and English text producers' communicative preferences tend to vary(cf., e.g. House 1996a).

6. The project initially investigates the inuence ELF has on German (later French andSpanish) texts. Ongoing PhD work by associated project workers is also wideningthis focus to Korean, Portuguese and Chinese texts.

7. A detailed description of the project and more comprehensive data analysis is givenin 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


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10. `Misunderstanding' is a complex phenomenon, and there are many di erent andpossibly interacting reasons why misunderstandings occur. Various `types' or levelsof such `problematic talk' have been suggested (cf. Coupland, Giles and Wiemann1991; House, Kasper and Ross 2003). In talking about misunderstandings in the

context of this paper, I refer (quite generally) to inappropriate comprehensionmanifest on the linguistic surface through, for example, requests for claricationor 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 HouseInstitut fuer Allgemeine und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft

Hamburg University

Von-Melle-Park 620146 Hamburg


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juliane house - a treat to multilinguarism

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