ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCAInteractions across Englishes

Reneta Borisova

INTRODUCTION The unprecedented spread of the English language from

England across the globe and into probably every country (to a greater or lesser extent) is a fact that has been commented on from many perspectives and by many scholars (e. g. Crystal 1997, Graddol 2006). Following this spread, English has gained the status of an international medium of communication, allowing for interactions across individuals who do not share the same first language, for example in politics, in academia, in humanitarian aid organizations, but also in everyday life. In many of these interactions, participants have mother tongues other than English. Graddol (2006) and other scholars have pointed out that the majority of interactions conducted in English today even take place without the presence of an English mother-tongue or first-language speaker. In these cases, English is functionally used as lingua franca.

FROM ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA TO INTERACTIONS ACROSS ENGLISHES

Meierkord and Knapp (2002: 10) emphasized that when a language is used as a lingua franca it often assumes highly heterogeneous forms across its diverse users. With regard to English, this heterogeneity had much earlier been addressed by Braj Kachru, who at the time explained that the spread of English resulted in many different Englishes, since a significant segment of the world’s population uses it as their other tongue (as a second or foreign languages).

Languages have been used as lingua francas from when people started to interact with individuals outside of their own speech community, either when they migrated into territories outside of the area inhabited by their speech community, or when they came to trade with individuals not speaking their language. One of the first documented languages used for the purpose of allowing communication across speakers of different languages was the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin used throughout large parts of the Mediterranean between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. In fact this language provides the origin of the term lingua franca.

ENGLISH AS LINGUA FRANCA: MYTHS AND REALITIES

The myths that have dominated much of the literature on English as a lingua franca are basically the following three:

Myth 1: As a lingua franca, English is an auxiliary language used for restricted communicative purposes only.Initial discussions of English used in lingua franca contexts in the 1980s necessarily related the topic to the definitions of the term lingua franca which existed at the time. These often related the term to the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the pidgin spoken around the Mediterranean Sea between the eleventh and early nineteenth centuries. Lingua Franca was spoken by traders and sailors in the region to facilitate communication across individuals speaking languages as diverse as Provencal, Venetian, Turkish, and Arabic. Because of this etymological link to a trade language and also since English has predominantly been used by a social elite for communication in international business contexts, in many countries, English as a lingua franca has frequently been taken to refer to interactions in business, politics, or international tertiary education.

Myth 2: As a lingua franca, English is used by educated speakers of English.From the first myth, scholars seem to have deducted that when individuals engage in international interactions they are educated speakers. This probably is also due to the fact that in most countries in which the New Englishes are spoken, especially in Africa and Asia, competence in the variety of English used in international business, politics, or education has in fact often been confined to a small, well-educated upper-middle-class section of the population. Smith (1984: 56) talks about “the grammar of educated English” in his discussion of “English as an international language”. In a similar vein, Kachru (1996: 907) refers to English used as a lingua franca in post-colonial countries as an “elite lingua franca”.

Myth 3: The use of English as a lingua franca will result in the development of a homogeneous international variety which can be codified.There is a variety which English assumes when employed as a lingua franca at the international level, i.e. when speakers use it for communication with people from other countries. The fact that English is often referred to as a world language seems to trigger the idea that the language would develop into a homogeneous form when used at the international level or in a particular region. Crystal (1997) envisages the development of an additional variety of English which speakers would use to communicate with individuals from other countries, and which he labels “World Standard Spoken English”. Along with this vision goes his assumption that this variety of English would not be used to convey identity. Rather, he assumes that “people who can use both, World Standard Spoken English and a national dialect, are in a much more powerful position: they have a dialect in which they can continue to express their national identity and one that can guarantee international intelligibility” (Crystal 1997: 15)

Whilst the different “myths” are all justified by the way research on the usage of English as a lingua franca developed, the realities of the present-day world do not support them. The ever-increasing number of speakers of English implies that a highly heterogeneous array of Englishes can be encountered in interactions between speakers who use English as a lingua franca.

In sum, English is neither limited to serving restricted functions nor to use by educated speakers only. Rather, the realities of English as a lingua franca suggest the following:

As a lingua franca, English is employed for a very wide variety of purposes.

As a lingua franca, English is used by speakers who have very diverse regional, social, and educational backgrounds.

Consequently, individuals have very diverse Englishes reflecting these regional, social, and educational backgrounds.

They bring these Englishes into the interactions in which English serves as a lingua franca.

FACTS FORM HISTORICAL POINT OF VIEWINTERACTIONS ACROSS ENGLISHES IN THE MIDDLE AGES When the English capital moved from Winchester to London after

the Norman Conquest, the city soon became the centre of commerce, culture, and politics, leading to immigration and language contact. In the twelfth century, London was characterized by intensive language contact, as the following quote indicates: “I do not at all like that city. All sorts of men crowd together there from every country under the heavens. Each race brings its own voices and its own customs to the city.” (The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, c.1190, quoted in Inwood 1998). At first, the contact mainly involved English and French. The court, Church, the universities, and the nobility initially spoke Norman French, which soon became the prestigious language in England. However, French was not restricted to the aristocracy. In fact, French spread in the middle class, since merchants, clerks, and others found it useful for their daily transactions. Thus, speakers of different degrees of English-French bilingualism could be found in London. After the loss of Normandy in 1204, English again spread to be used at all levels of society.

Given its importance as a cultural, economic, and administrative centre, London and its immediate surrounds became the most important area for development of a writing standard in Middle English. As Blake (1992: 13) argues:

It might be said that each local standard draws its conventions from a pool which consists of local and traditional, national and local features, with the local and traditional features being more important at first and the national gaining in importance as the fifteenth century progresses

The situation of English in the Middle Ages involved territorial expansion and trading activities. However, with colonization from the late sixteenth century onward and the ensuing unprecedented spread of English, we are looking at one language transported by large numbers of its speakers into much more diverse and more distant territories.

INTERACTIONS ACROSS ENGLISHES IN COLONIZATION CONTEXTS

When the European nations discovered Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific areas, settlements were soon established in those parts of the world which seemed to offer suitable living conditions. England (Britain following the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707) established such colonies in what today are the United States of America, Canada, parts of the Caribbean (particularly Barbados), South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Colonization most often started in the form of trade colonies. Following initial periods of trade, the settlements commonly developed either into exploitation colonies or settlement colonies. Whilst the former did not usually attract many settlers, settlement colonies are characterized by the fact that large numbers of individuals originating in the colonizing nation settled in the new territories and would eventually become majority populations. This involved migration of individuals from diverse parts of the British Isles into North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

There is much evidence that the New Englishes in the colonies developed very early and that all other varieties of English brought to the areas at later stages had only limited influence on the newly emerging varieties, diverse Englishes were in contact, and hence Interactions across Englishes took place, throughout the history of these colonies

CURRENT LINGUA FRANCAS

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several artificial languages were created to find a means that would assure effective communication across the world. These languages largely exist in theory only or have ceased to be used. An important exception is Esperanto, which is being actively used by a community of Esperantists (Fiedler 2002 and 2006). More recently, further English-based planned languages such as Airspeak or Seaspeak have been created to crater to the increased need for a standardized code available for effective and unambiguous communication in the domains of traffic control and ship-to-shore communication. Although a number of attempts have been made to introduce an engineered lingua franca, such as Esperanto, to facilitate worldwide communication, the languages used as lingua francas today are largely natural languages. Whereas pidgin and creole languages tend to be used for wider communication within a country or a geographical region, many of the ethnic languages are spread across larger parts of the world.

VARIATION IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

Amongst the different lingua francas that exist around the world, English is the language that has gained the status of a global language. It is used for worldwide communication across nations and between individuals who speak mutually unintelligible languages, but it also serves as an international lingua franca in a large number of countries which had previously been colonized by the British. Crystal (1997) estimates that approximately 1,000 million people speak English as a second language today. The status of English is strengthened through global alliances but also through organizations which operate at a regional level.

ECONOMY The vast majority of economic

organizations have settled for English as their sole official or working language. When several languages have been chosen, their number is highly restricted but always includes English. Also, the language used for communication via the organizations’ websites is mostly English only.

POLITICS The situation is somewhat different

when we look at political organizations, because a lot of them aim at reflecting their member states’ cultural and/or linguistic diversity by adopting various official languages and also by offering information on a multilingual website. Extreme cases are the European Union, which has a very explicit policy of promoting multilingualism, and the African Union which at least encourages the use of all its member countries’ official languages. Overall, the picture which emerges from the international political organizations is one that reflects multilingual language policies.

There has been a significant change as regards the locations in which new varieties and codes develop. Whereas such developments were previously largely in regions into which today’s majority languages had been transported as a result of colonization, many new varieties today develop when speakers of minority languages migrate into countries where these languages do not have historical speech communities. At the same time, many mixed codes have emerged in post-colonial settings, in communities which have been multilingual for a considerable time and now draw on both or all languages in their linguistic repertoire. In Kenya, for example, Kiswahili, local Kenyan languages, and English have blended into a mixed code, Sheng. Functionally, such mixed codes are more often than not in-group codes. They will most likely be taken into Interactions across Englishes if they develop into first languages (as recently seems to be the case with Sheng) or when speakers deliberately use them to enact their identity.

The diverse socio-historic ecologies which characterize the various types of English that exist today have been captured in Mesthrie and Bhatt’s (2008) classification of Englishes. They distinguish between the following:

Metropolitan standards (e.g. London, Washington, Los Angeles) Colonial standards (e.g. Australian English and Canadian English) Regional dialects (e.g. Geordie) Social dialects Pidgin Englishes (e.g. Nigerian Pidgin English) Creole Englishes (e.g. Jamaican creole) English as a second language (e.g. Kenyan English or Indian

English) English as a foreign language (as used in e.g. China, Germany or

Brazil) Immigrant Englishes (e.g. Chicano English in the USA) Language-shift Englishes (Englishes which develop when speech

communities replace their original first language with English, e.g. Hiberno English in Ireland)

Jargon Englishes (unstable, pre-pidgin linguistic systems) Hybrid Englishes (mixed codes involving English and an(other)

language(s), such as Taglish and Singlish)

ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA ON THE INTERNET

Whereas we have so far been looking at face-to-face interactions, English has become a language of virtual interaction as well. Following the fast development of internet technologies, many instances of Interactions across Englishes today take place without the mutual presence of the participants in the same physical environment. Rather than interacting in real-life locations, individuals meet in virtual spaces. This includes SMS, chat, emails, etc.

In 1995, Cumming (1995: 4) stated that “it is clear to even the most casual Internet browser that the trend is for most national networks to present at least part of their connection to the Internet in some form of English”. But English is no longer the default language for communication on the Internet. As Graddol points out, there has been a sharp drop in the share of web pages that are in English in comparison to the total – that is from 82% in 1998 via 72% in 1999 to 68% in 2000. At the same time “the proportion of internet users for whom English is a first language has been decreasing fast” (2006: 44), dropping from 51.3 % in 2000 to 32% in 2005. The figures seem to be even lower when looking at English used by non-native speakers to communicate to or with other non-native speakers, i.e. as a lingua franca, on the Internet.

CONCLUSION As a conclusion, I would like to represent the meaning of this term paper by sharing a widely

spread joke about English as a lingua franca and the inevitable changes which it experiences in this manner:

THE LINGUA FRANCA JOKEThis particular version came from Euro English: Lingua Franca or The Trumpet of Doom?The European Language Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase in plan that would be known as “EuroEnglish”:

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”..sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favor of the “k”. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with the “f”. This will make words like “fotograf” 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent “e”‘s in the language is disgracful, and they should go away.

By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”. During ze fifz year, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaiining “ou” and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!