Volume 2006, Issue 177

As Graddol (2004) has recently claimed, the world may eventually face the death of a large number of languages over the next decades. He argues that an increasing number of communicative functions will be performed by languages which have the status of a lingua franca. Due to demographic developments, technological advances, and international communication, a restricted number of languages will spread to be used as lingua francas. Graddol estimates that in approximately fifty years from now, these will be Arabic, English, Hindi/Urdu, and Spanish.

In this paper, lingua franca communication is understood as involving language contact (cf. Thomason 2001: 21), which results in a linguistic situation characterized by coexisting and competing linguistic features of which speakers may eventually select individual ones for permanent, regular usage. Greek, Latin, and English in medieval British society, especially in London, will serve as reference cases in the first part of this contribution. The second part of this paper will address the similarities and differences between these historical instances of lingua franca communication and present-day English in both a local, South African, and in its global function. The paper aims at identifying the sociolinguistic factors which control(led) the availability of linguistic features and the choices eventually made by the lingua franca's speakers. Factors such as communicative needs, technological facilities and economic power will be discussed as determining standardization as well as self-regulation, which are regarded as simultaneously operating processes.

Languages in contact inevitably undergo cross-fertilization. English is no exception in that wherever it takes roots, a tension develops between a traditionally exonormative standard and the incorporation of local adaptations into the standard. Some sociopolitical motivations for restandardizing new varieties of English are explored. I argue that spoken practices are largely self-norming and thus beyond deliberate restandardization. By contrast, although written norms are potentially amenable to manipulation by language planners, successful restandardization requires the participation of influential users, especially in the print media. Thus, two factors must coalesce for restandardization to succeed: writers must agree to promote forms that diverge from prestigious transnational practice and/or institutional forces must exercise control over written norms and their users. Even in the event of the powerful agreeing on which forms to elevate to standard status, private interests will not support written restandardization beyond limited relexification because they have little to gain and much to lose from differentiating themselves from prestigious transnational practices. Moreover, the degree of coercion required to implement substantial restandardization of written norms may be undesirable because it would fall beyond limits deemed acceptable in most pluralistic societies and impractical because it would challenge the administrative capabilities of many societies.

When people discuss English as a global lingua franca, the implication is not so much how widely used the language is but rather what form of English should be used. This paper describes the role and features of a variety of English used in Singapore as one example of the developing new varieties of English that are emerging. The consequences of the spread of new varieties is then discussed in more general terms of standardization, identity, and what role the language classroom has to play in developing a global English.

This paper is concerned with Esperanto, the only planned language system that has managed the successful transition from the status of a mere project to a full-fledged language. This is partly due to linguostructural properties, but above all to extralinguistic factors. Esperanto has found a sufficiently diverse and productive speech community which guarantees the constant and sustained dissemination of the language. This paper describes Esperanto as a planned language of the autonomous a posteriori subgroup. Its linguistic norm, which is documented in the Fundamento de Esperanto (1905), has developed steadily and become stable. It is supervised by the Akademio de Esperanto . Self-regulation takes place in a field of tension between diversifying forces (e.g. different linguistic and cultural influences because of the speakers' native backgrounds) and unifying forces (e.g. application during international meetings, literature, and radio programs). Its productive and flexible word formation system and syntax make Esperanto a means of communication with high expressive quality and stylistic variation. The main reason for the ease of Esperanto communication, however, is its democratic character: the lack of a native speaker whose competence decides on the language standard facilitates symmetrical communication.

Afrikaans has been a lingua franca throughout its existence. Its early development took place mainly in and around Cape Town, in a situation of intensive language contact between indigenous Khoekhoe, Dutch settlers, and slaves. Since most people learned it informally, often from other non-native speakers, and since the Cape was relatively isolated from conservative linguistic influences, the language changed a great deal. Until the late nineteenth century, there was no concerted attempt to regulate it. Regulation and standardization occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time of great hostility between white speakers of Dutch / Afrikaans and the British colonial authorities. The standard dialect was based on a variety spoken by white Afrikaners. After its declaration as an official language alongside English in 1925, political and cultural institutions promoted its use in all domains by all South Africans. The Afrikaner nationalist government, which took power in 1948, made renewed efforts to enforce the use of the language. The language was strongly associated with apartheid, and many of its speakers feared that it would suer in the new democracy. It does have less prominence in public life, but is still being used as a lingua franca.

Though English is increasingly becoming the lingua franca in many Southeast Asian countries, this is hardly the case in Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia, on the other hand, has so successfully spread throughout the archipelago as a lingua franca that many of the indigenous languages have suffered or may soon suffer extinction as a result. Even if Javanese is far from becoming extinct, the complexity and functions of the language are clearly suffering reduction as a result of the increasing use of Bahasa Indonesia. One feature of the structure of Javanese which has attracted the attention of scholars since the early days of Dutch colonization is the complex system of speech levels, clearly marking the relationship between speaker and addressee in a much more explicit and precise way than can be done in most languages. The effect of the use of Bahasa Indonesia for an increasing number of functions on the competence of the young in manipulating the speech levels will be the topic of this paper. Standardization of the use of Bahasa Indonesia has been in progress for decades, but the process now appears to have become almost self-perpetuating, so that both standardization and self-regulation are evident.

The default assumption in human communication is mutual intelligibility between interlocutors. Nevertheless, misunderstandings also occur, and languages have resources for managing these in communicative interaction. When speakers do not share a native language, misunderstandings are generally expected to arise more frequently than between native speakers of the same language. However, it is not clear that communication breakdown is more common among second language users; the anticipation of communicative difficulty may in itself offset much of the trouble, and speakers resort to proactive strategies. This paper investigates misunderstanding and its prevention among participants in university degree programs where English was used as a lingua franca. The findings suggest that speakers engage in various clarification and repair strategies in an apparent attempt to ensure the achievement of mutual intelligibility and thereby the achievement of important communicative goals.

English as a lingua franca (ELF) typically involves the reconciliation of two factors: the intercultural intelligibility among its users and the cultural identity of its individual speakers. It is argued in this paper that the local context, referred to as the “habitat factor,” is of particular relevance with regard to the self-regulation of ELF. Investigating the habitat-specific realizations of pragmatic fluency, and drawing on the work of House (1999), we seek to show how ELF users integrate their mother tongue (L1) communicative norms efficiently into their second language English conversation. We consider the particular case of the use by L1 Arabic speakers of multifunctional discourse markers and strategies to achieve a culturally appropriate ethos of musayara in their interaction, and more generally how the high-involvement style characterized by cooperative overlaps displays a strong tendency toward an L1 discourse style. What our study illustrates is how the global phenomenon of ELF varies in its local realizations.

Ágnes Lesznyák: Communication in English as an International Lingua Franca. An Exploratory Case Study . Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2004. 274 pp. ISBN: 3-8334-0792-1. €24.90 (Anne Barron) Kay McCormick: Language in Cape Town's District Six . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xvi + 253pp. ISBN: 0-19-823554-2. £55 (Christiane Meierkord)