![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
English has spread and is used around the world, often as a rational choice made by professional groups and bilingual speech communities. In Europe, it is used as a language of wider communication or a lingua franca. This study argues that although English can be the means of expression of local or national or European identities, and even though ‘Euro-English’ has some identifiable features, it is unlikely to develop into a distinct, stable, codifiable and teachable variety, wholly independent of native English norms.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lance Hewson, Andy Kirkpatrick, Michael McCarthy and Anna Wierzbicka for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
Notes
1 David Graddol (Citation2006: 63) has suggested that Mandarin could replace English as the global lingua franca, but this seems unlikely as a written language: Learning Chinese characters takes up 30% of primary school curriculum time in Hong Kong, plus lots of homework (Kirkpatrick, Citation2008).
2 According to the European Commission's survey of languages (2006: 12; 14), 38% of Continental Europeans claim to know English well enough to have a conversation, 69% of these claiming a good or very good level of the language.
3 Seidlhofer (Citation2002) compares BASIC with her own ELF project.
4 There are plausible reasons for questioning the notions of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speakers, which I do not have space to outline here. Some applied linguists enclose the terms in inverted commas, which I shall not do either.
5 Grin (Citation2003) gives a rough estimate of US$19bn, rounded up here for inflation and rhetorical effect, although the effect has been greatly diminished by the vast sums of money regularly quoted in relation to the recent financial crisis. Van Parijs (Citation2007) floats the idea of a linguistic tax on the native speakers of the lingua franca to subsidize the learning of it by others, but unsurprisingly rejects this as unworkable.
6 The same is of course true of EJES, a journal devoted to English Studies.
7 See Mocikat et al. (Citation2005) and Zabel (Citation2005).
8 This list of names does, however, suggest, or reveal, that the prevailing notions of scientific method, knowledge and proof are profoundly Eurocentric. Canagarajah (Citation2002) and others have shown how ‘non-Western’ scholars are obliged to frame local knowledge into Anglo (or ‘Western’) paradigms, which tends to alter or reframe the knowledge itself.
9 In most countries, the bulk of undergraduate science teaching is still done in the local language.
10 The American Association for the Advancement of Science discussed this issue for the first time at their 2008 annual meeting, in a symposium called ‘English-Only Science in a Multilingual World: Costs, Benefits, and Options’. 22 Jan. 2009 <http://www.aven.com/conf.cfm/cid/1038/pg/7>. See Lieberman (Citation2008).
11 See, for example, the various points of view collected in Anderman and Rogers (Citation2005).
12 This term seems to originate in Pride (Citation1982) and Platt et al. (Citation1984). See also Mufwene (Citation1994).
13 Brutt-Griffler adapts the term ‘econocultural’ from Randolph Quirk (Citation1988: 229), who described the econocultural model of language spread, resulting from the spread of ideas or business, without much population movement.
14 Berns (Citation2007) contests the likelihood of the products of global corporatism replacing all the national characteristics and the ‘common mental programming’ described by intercultural communication theorists such as Hofstede (Citation1980; Citation1996).
15 Modiano's article is an extended review of Mollin (Citation2006), a book that takes the contrary position –‘Euro-English seems to be the Yeti of English varieties: everyone has heard of it, but no one has ever seen it’ (2006: 1) – but it does not give a single example of Euro-English. By the time this issue of EJES is published, both Barbara Seidlhofer's VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English) and Anna Mauranen's ELFA corpus (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) should be available to researchers online, making data-free articles a thing of the past. See <http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/> and <http://www.tay.fi/laitokset/kielet/engf/research/elfa/>
16 Some of these ELF forms, including the unchanging isn't it tag and the transformation of uncountable nouns into countable ones, are also widely found across New Englishes: See Brutt-Griffler (Citation2002: 156–58).
17 See <http://abb.hardcore.lt>.
18 Many schools across Europe are increasing the amount of native-like English presented to learners by way of CLIL, or content and language integrated learning – the study of other curriculum subjects through the medium of English.
19 Berns (Citation2008) insists that the ‘World Englishes' paradigm or perspective associated with the work of Kachru and others is based on an awareness of multiplicity and creativity rather than a search for norms, and thus conflicts with the ELF position. She also points out (2008: 333) that ‘identification of core features of non-native speech in an effort to control language performance and guarantee the success of this performance – even if the result is the overthrow of the tyrannical native speaker – is simply meeting the new boss who's same [sic] as the old boss, or the hegemony of the old with the hegemony of the new’.
20 A further complication is that most language teachers will attest that whatever model they teach, the learners learn something less than it, so if you teach ELF – whether it is thought of as a variety in itself, or as a simplified version of ENL – they will produce a simplified version of that, raising the spectre of an infinite regress.
21 Jenkins (Citation2007) devotes a lot of space rebutting those who disagree with her views regarding ELF. Everyone with contrary opinions is said to have misconceptions or to have misrepresented or misunderstood or misinterpreted ELF, to suffer from sociolinguistic naivety, to be ‘unable to make the necessary conceptual shift’ (16), to have irrational or subconscious fears, or deeply entrenched prejudices, or ‘deep-seated concerns and insecurities about language change’ (118), or to feel threatened by ELF from a ‘traditional NS-normative perspective’ (122). This form of argumentation has led Alan Maley, borrowing from the Indian playwright Girish Kanath, to lament the ‘holier than cow’ attitude of some proponents of ELF.
22 Consequently, if one holds with Wierzbicka (Citation2006) that English necessarily contains embedded Anglo concepts, cultural assumptions and communicative norms, and accepts the post-structuralist postulate that our very subjectivity is constructed by and in language, all speakers of English are imbued, to a greater or lesser extent, with what Wierzbicka calls ‘Angloness,’ rather than speaking in a ‘post-cultural’ way.
23 This is the reason for the ‘so-called’ in the title of my 2002 ESSE conference paper ‘Language teaching and the uses of the so-called English as a lingua franca’, although you would not learn this from Jenkins's (Citation2007: 41) account of it.
24 Notwithstanding Seidlhofer's insistence that ELF is not a deficient form of English, a derogatory term is gaining currency in Denmark to describe the reduced variety of English used by many Danes: Cirkusengelsk.
25 There is a shorter version of this argument in Clark and Holquist (Citation1984: 11–13).