New Englishes as post-geographic englishes in lingua franca use

Abstract

Prominent instances of New Englishes in the world today are those which are used in international communication and do not manifest any specific regional or national characteristics or allegiance. Such post-geographic Englishes are frequently used in a lingua franca function and ever-increasingly in the more informal and casual domains of verbal expression. Given this situation, it is argued that sociolinguistic theory must be revised and expanded to accommodate the new realities. In addition to the Hallidayan notions of ‘dialect’ and ‘register’ to characterize varieties of a language, the present article argues for the development of the notion of ‘genre’ to capture the varietal characteristics of these New Englishes. Relating the generic qualities of language to genre as treated in linguistic text research, in corpus linguistics, in Bakhtinian theory and in Critical Discourse Analysis, it is shown that the concept as a constituent factor (with dialect and register) in the ‘interdiscursivity’ of texts is equally constitutive of language as social event. After a practical illustration of interdiscursivity in three short extracts of New English(es) as lingua franca, it is concluded that the present sociolinguistic interpretation seems to fit in with views of language change in sociological late modernity.

Keywords:

• New Englishes
• post-geographic Englishes
• English as lingua franca
• dialect
• register
• genre
• interdiscursivity
• late modernity

Notes

For further critical discussion, see also James (2005).

In the following only those aspects of Bakhtin's comprehensive treatment of genre will be adduced which are immediately of relevance to the present argument.

A small corpus of some 70,000 words in total based at the University of Klagenfurt of English spoken as lingua franca in the region of southern Austria, North East Italy and central-western Slovenia. The corpus consists for the most part of the language of adolescents and young adults and was collected and (partially) transcribed between 1999 and 2004, mainly via student projects.