Communication strategies as vehicles of intercultural border crossing

Abstract

The growth of English as an instrument of international communication (EIL) has put it in the unprecedented position of having more non-native than native speakers. This has incurred changes in EIL form and usage profound enough for some scientists to proclaim it a specific variety in its own right that needs to be thoroughly described and codified for the purposes of establishing internationally accepted standards of use. The paper argues that EIL (English as an International Language) codification and standardization, though important for some domains of use, could not account for the full complexity of cross-cultural communication. Used by a highly diverse community of bilingual/multilingual speakers seeking to satisfy their ever-shifting communicative needs and promote their identities across cultural boundaries, EIL is largely constructed in the process of communication. Considering it an auxiliary language, EIL speakers have no express purpose of developing their own norms of speaking. What they seek instead is a fair level of mutual understanding despite culturally set constraints on shared knowledge, and smooth and harmonious relations between conversational partners. Against this backdrop, self-directed strategic behaviour emerges as an equally, and in less formal contexts even more important EIL feature than codification and standardization.