Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Barbara Seidlhofer

seeking to explain the concept as such and describing how ELF users interact amongst themselves, how they understand each others’ ELF. Understanding ELF in both these senses is not an easy task to tackle in one book, and so while this is not a bulky volume it has been long in the making, as the years spent writing it were also the years in which ELF research gathered considerable pace and momentum. Although discussion about the ‘ownership’ of English has been going on for quite some time, this issue and its implications, so central to an understanding of ELF, still stand in need of conceptual clarification. This has become more pressing as the number of ELF users continues to increase with accelerating globalization.

      Nobody is likely to deny that English has, in one way or another, in some shape or form, become a global lingua franca in the contemporary world. But acknowledging the existence of ELF is, of course, not the same as approving of it, and two kinds of disapproval have been widely expressed, both related to this question of ownership. The first concerns the way in which English is perceived as an alien invasive force, occupying the space of other languages and so threatening linguistic and cultural diversity. The second kind of disapproval concerns the form, or forms, that English takes in its international uses, perceived as its various ‘deviations’ from the established standard of ‘proper’ English, which are seen to undermine the very integrity and intelligibility of the language itself.

      These reactions are oddly contradictory. The first assumes that English is being transferred essentially intact into various contexts of use, carrying with it the sociocultural and political values that are encoded in it. In this view, the very use of the language involves complicity in its hegemonic influence, whether intended or not. The second reaction assumes that, far from remaining intact, the language is dispersing and deteriorating into reduced and deviant versions of the original. According to one reaction, it is English that threatens its non-native users, and according to the other it is the non-native users who threaten English. Though contradictory, what both reactions have in common is a refusal to accept that English, like any natural language, is dynamic and variable and could not otherwise function as a means of communication at all.

      It is surely strange that in the face of the obvious spread of ELF, the view still widely persists that the only English that should be given recognition for international use is the standard language as defined by its native speakers. One explanation may be the inertia of norms, combined with vested interests. But I think the most significant factor that has prevented real progress towards a fresh conceptualization of English is the surprising disinclination of sociolinguists to engage seriously with the naturally adaptive process of language variation that ELF represents. From other perspectives, the critical discussion of ELF has received important impulses from thinking in many fields that are not so much concerned with the linguistics of English, but more with socio-political and cultural issues, including globalization, multilingualism, cultural and postcolonial studies, often in conjunction with the advocacy of linguistic diversity and human rights. But what has been conspicuously lacking is a serious consideration of the significance of ELF from within the communities of academics and practitioners concerned with English who are – or should be – most directly affected by it: descriptive linguists in various areas of expertise such as lexicogrammar, historical linguistics or sociolinguistics, and applied linguists and practitioners concerned with areas such as language education policy, language pedagogy, assessment, or interpreting. Whatever the explanation for this relative neglect, the consequence is that debates on the meta-level about the pros and cons of ELF have only created an illusion that we are facing up to the issues, while really allowing things to stay as they are. As long as the language itself remains untouched, and untouchable, this is unlikely to change.

      What I shall argue in this book is that English as a lingua franca needs to be understood as an entirely ‘ordinary’ and unsurprising, sociolinguistic phenomenon. There is, as I have indicated, a good deal of resistance to understanding it as such, and indeed reluctance to try to understand it at all. The reasons for these reactions can be traced to deep-rooted attitudes to English that go back a long way. So although the global spread of English as a lingua franca belongs very much to the present, it needs to be put in perspective by reference to the past. This is why I have dedicated a good deal of space in this book to a discussion of how ELF relates to, and challenges, established ideas about what English is and how one might go about describing it.

      As far as questions of teaching and learning are concerned, it is an obvious fact that ELF users, though instructed to learn and use the standard language at school very often do not do so but make use of English in other ways for one reason or another. But for what reason? One might argue that it is because teachers have failed to get them to learn the language properly and that they are therefore sent out into the world with a linguistic deficiency. This argument would lead us to suppose that, in spite of a long history of such failure, an approach to teaching (hitherto undiscovered) might be devised one day that does get learners to conform to the standard language. It also assumes as self-evident that conforming to the standard language is what users of English need to do in order to be communicatively competent. The use of ELF, however, provides abundant evidence that the ‘deficient’ English that learners acquire can be put to efficient use as a communicative resource.

      Such evidence has generally been regarded as inadmissible in the teaching of English as a foreign or other language. It has usually been taken as axiomatic that the only kind of communication that can be sanctioned is that which conforms to norms of linguistic correctness. This in turn is based on the assumption that the main reason for learning English, as with any other foreign language, is to communicate with its native speakers (or rather a subset of them whose English corresponds to the approved norms of usage). But this ignores the fact that English is unlike other languages: as is now well attested, most of its users do not mainly, or even at all, engage with native speakers, and so these norms are no longer communicatively appropriate. Nor does the assumption hold that there are inextricable links between ‘a language’ and ‘a culture’. This is not to deny that English does carry associations of a colonial past and a capitalist present, for instance when Australian, British, or North American television series are broadcast the world over. But looking closely at how people now use ELF we can see how they generally do this without becoming ‘anglicized’ – if anything, they are ‘de-anglicizing’ their English.

      So understanding the nature and implications of ELF involves taking account of a range of issues about language ownership, variation, and pedagogy. But not only is it, as I have indicated, relevant to such areas as sociolinguistic research and language teaching but also to a whole spectrum of practical and theoretical issues both within and beyond academia concerning, for example, language assessment, translation and interpreting, language and education policy, international research and development, professional communication, and diplomatic mediation and peace-keeping. Of course, each of these areas of activity has its own concerns and priorities and, as I have frequently experienced at conferences, these will usually give rise to different reactions to ELF, often mutually contradictory. It would be surprising if this book did not meet with the same diversity of reactions.

      While I obviously will not be able to satisfy all expectations a book on this topic may raise, I can make it as clear as possible what my intention was in writing it. To begin with, the book focuses on spoken ELF, as it is by studying the spoken language that emergent processes of variation and change can be most readily observed. Once these processes are understood, more work will have to be done on how they are relevant to various kinds of written communication. Of course, the book does not aim to offer a comprehensive description of spoken ELF usage as such. Its perspective is conceptual rather than descriptive and although a good deal of description appears, this is meant to exemplify various phenomena and processes, and especially, to show that none of these are actually unique to ELF. It was tempting to provide more description of data in VOICE, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, which has been developed alongside the writing of this book over recent years. But this would not have been appropriate to my main purpose, and anyway more and more description is now becoming available in individual studies. My primary concern is to present a clear argument for a well founded conceptualization of ELF, and I have homed in on the issues that seem most important for this purpose. There was much more that I would have liked to include, but then left out so as not to distract from the main line of argument – not only more description but more theoretical