English as a lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism

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English as a lingua franca A threat to
multilingualism?

• Juliane Housejhouse_at_uni-hamburg.dehttp//www.u
  ni-hamburg.de/fachbereiche-einrichtungen/sfb538/

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• 1. Clarifying the term English as a lingua
  franca (ELF)
• 2. ELF as a threat to multilingualism or a chance
  for global understanding from three perspectives
• (1) socio-political
• (2) linguistic
• (3) psycholinguistic (linguistic
  relativity)
• 3. Conclusion

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1. English as lingua franca (ELF)

• Functional flexibility, global spread over many
  domains of language use, openness for foreign
  forms (Firth 1996)
• Decreasing influence of inner circle (Kachru
  1992) as a hegemonic variety
• ELF is not a language for specific purposes, a
  pidgin- or creole language, foreigner talk or
  learner language
• The interlanguage paradigm is inadequate

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• The multilingual individual and its
  multicompetence as norm (Cook 1992)
• Simultaneous activation of L1 und ELF (Grosjean
  2001)
• ELF as register (Widdowson 2003) and as a
  language for communication (House 2003)
• Crucial difference between a language for
  communication and a language for identification

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2. ELF viewed from three perspectives (1) The
socio-political perspective

• Why English? Crystals (1997) so-called
  triumphalism. Former British empire, present
  day US global power
• Preference for a simple language?

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ELF as Threat, Killer Language, Agent of
Linguistic Imperialism?

• Voluntary use of ELF as language with wide
  communicative range
• Subjectively felt difference between languages
  for communication and for identification
• Artificial dichotomy through assumption of
  monolingual individuals and societies
• ELF as language for communication und L1(s) as
  language(s) for identification are NOT in
  competition, but supplement each other

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• I really dont mind speaking English at all, I
  speak it fairly well and I have to in this
  multinational company. But German, my mother
  tongue, is something completely different. German
  will for me be linked for ever with my childhood,
  my family, my grandparents and my dreams
• (MCInt 13,3)

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• "As for English I do speak the language but I
  don't think I'll ever talk it. English flows from
  the mind to the tongue and then to the pages of
  books... I only talk Vietnamese. I talk it with
  all my senses. Vietnamese does not stop on my
  tongue, but flows with the warm, soothing lotus
  tea down my throat like a river giving life to
  the landscape in her path. It rises to my mind
  along the vivid images of my grandmother's house
  and my grandmother... (Kramsch 2002 98-99).

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• Linguistic Human Rights ?

• ELF speakers often know what theyre doing when
  they choose to use ELF
• De Swaan Alas, what decides is not the right of
  human beings to speak whatever language they
  wish, but the freedom of everybody else to ignore
  what they say in the language of their choice.
  (200152)
• Double Bind Situation for ELF speakers

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• A Chinese colleague from Hongkong
• "I always feel that non-native speakers of
  English are forever caught in a kind of double
  bind. Take for example those of us who were
  brought up in Hong Kong. I got criticized at
  school and at university if I didn't speak
  English, but I also got criticized (mostly by
  those who pretended to be politically correct) if
  I spoke English. It was only in the last few
  years that I stopped wishing I had two mouths.
  English, I believe, can never replace our mother
  tongue, certainly not where the emotional
  intensity of feelings is concerned.

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• Paradox Use of ELF as language for communication
  often provokes and strengthens use of indigenous
  languages and dialects for identification
  purposes and as a vehicle of protest against ELF
  dominance
• Strong counter-currents even in modern music
  scene and INTERNET, classic killers of other
  languages ELF and native varieties increasingly
  co-exist or merge
• - Expression of Chinese rhetorical traditions
• in medium of English (Bloch 2004)
• - New mixed varieties of ELF and Chinese
• used to demonstrate and expand their
  multilingual
• competence (Lam 2004)

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(2) The Linguistic Perspective

• Main argument against ELF Disadvantage of
  non-native speakers (reduced personality)
• Results of empirical studies of ELF interactions
  contradict this claim (Firth 1996 House 2002
  Lesznyák 2004)

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• No misunderstandings, no repairs (stark contrast
  to native/non-native interactions)
• Tolerant Let-it-Pass behaviour, Robustness
  and Normality of ELF talk despite its
  seemingly linguistically lawless nature (Firth
  and Wagner, to appear)

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The Hamburg ELF ProjectData Basis

• Interactions in L1 English
• Interactions between L1 English speakers and ELF
  speakers
• ELF interactions between speakers of different
  L1s
• Retrospective interviews re 3 for collaborative
  interpretation

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Results

• Confirmation of previous findings
• Three further ELF characteristics.

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1. Transfer of L1 Discourse Conventions

• Example Asian ELF speakers tendency towards
  cyclical topic management. Result Non-sequitur
  turns. This is however consistently ignored by
  other participants Discourse remains totally
  normal and ordinary.

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DATA Excerpt 1
Joy Does maybe the nationalism erm in
Quebec Wei For us we don't have problem I mean
Asian people Chinese for example ----------------
--------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
-- Brit I've seen several movies in Japanese
recently like Manga Comics are very popular
Wei Since perhaps twenty years (2 sec) a lot
of Chinese people began to learn a
second foreign language its.._at_
------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
-------------------- Joy When you speak English
so you can _at_ translate in English or you can use
the one language and not three
languages Wei You know the problem is Taiwan
Hongkong and Mainland China and the different
and the difference (2 sec) how to say
and the very different history this is the
problem _at_ ---------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------- Brit But
people have an interest in keeping their
languages (1 sec) like Wales or erm in
Ireland they try to revive the Gaelic Irish
(2sec) I think it's got something to do with
identity Wei I think in South-East Asia perhaps
the first foreign language be English and a
second foreign language perhaps Japanese or
German (5sec) perhaps a Chinese
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2. Frequency of Multi-functional Gambit
Represent (Edmondson and House 1981)

• (Parts of) previous speakers moves are
  re-presented - Why?
• Supports working memory in comprehension and
  production
• Creates coherence (construction of
  lexical-paradigmatic clusters)
• Signals receipt and confirms understanding
• Functions as meta-communicative procedure, thus
  strengthening awareness

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Data Excerpt 2

• Joy And you mean that English (2sec) is really
  getting important or taken for the education
  because the grammar is syntactic erm the grammar
  is very
• easy
• Wei is easy is very easy

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• Represents (also echo-, mirror- or shadow
  elements ) are typical of psycho-therapeutic
  interviews, instructional- and aircraft control
  discourse, where information is deliberately
  restated to create coherence
• ELF speakers imitation of this convention is
  proof of their strategic competence!

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3. Solidarity and consensus through
co-con-construction of utterances

• Demonstration of consensus in the face of
  cultural differences leads to a feeling of
  community and group identity (Tajfel 1981)
• ELF as egalitarian tool (We are all in the same
  boat). Speakers support each other, even pay
  each other compliments (My English is I think
  very bad----No no no its much better than
  mine, Firth und Wagner, to appear).

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Data Excerpt 3

• Joy I recently read an article in a Korean
• erm (2 sec) Moment (4 sec).
• Brit Newspaper, Internet?
• Joy Yes thank you _at_ erm the article is
• about new foreign language
• education in Japan

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Data Excerpt 4

• Mau I think it begins erm of course with the
• colonialism I think too because the
• history of this development how the
• language in the very early period erm
• (3 sec)
• Joy Build up this basis
• Mau Yes
• Joy To be a world language
• Mau Yes

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• ELF users strategic competence intact They are
  able to carry out meaningful, normal discourse.
• No reduced personality syndrom!
• ELF as a useful tool for communication and
  understanding whenever no other common language
  available

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• Another argument against ELF It contaminates
  other languages
• This argument can be relativised on the basis of
  the results of another empirical research
  project.

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The Project Covert Translation in the German
Science Foundations Research Center on
Multilingualism

• Intitial Hypothesis
• Due to ELFs global status and massive
  uni-directional translations from English, it
  influences over and above lexical invasions
  communicative norms in other languages

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Communicative Norms English German(House 1996)
Imitation Change

• English
• Indirectness
• Orientation towards persons
• Implicitness
• Verbal routines
• interactional
• involved

• English
• Indirectness
• Orientation towards persons
• Implicitness
• Verbal routines
• interactional
• involved

• German
• Directness
• Orientation towards content
• Explicitness
• Ad-hoc-Formulation
• transactional
• detached

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Corpus

• English-German originals and translations
  (French and Spanish control texts)
• Popular Science Texts
• Scientific American, New Scientist and their
  satellite journals
• Micro-diachronic 1978-1982 1999-2002
• 500 000 Words
• Economic Texts
• Annual reports by internationally operating
  companies
• Letters to shareholders, Missions, Visions,
  Corporate statements
• Reverse Translation Relation German-English,
  French/Spanish-English
• 130 000 Words

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Method

• Combination of qualitative and quantitative
  methods
• Qualitative House Translation Evaluation Model
• Quantitative Frequency Counts
• Renewed qualitative analysis

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Three Phases of Study

• Phase 1 Qualitative Analyses
• - Result differences in subjectivity and
  addressee
• orientation in originals and
  translations
• Phase 2 Quantification
• - Result differences in frequency of
  linguistic means of expressing
• subjectivity and addresssee
  orientation
• Phase 3 Re-contextualising qualitative analyses
  isolation of all
• occurrences of vulnerable
  elements
• - Manual annotation to locate
  co-occurences with e.g. tense, mood
• - Do equivalent elements occur
  in same linguistic context?
• - Are equivalent elements used for
  same communicative function?
• - translation relation,
  genre-contrastive
• Statistics Multivariate
  analyses, complex co-occurrence patterns

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• Refined Hypothesis Increased frequency of
  certain means of realising subjectivity and
  addressee orientation in German texts over past
  25 years imitating Anglophone communicative
  norms. E.g.
• - Speaker-hearer deixis
• - Modality
• - Mental processes

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Popular science articles

• Orientation towards persons

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Genre-specific results
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Preliminary Results

• Changed use of certain forms expressing
  subjectivity and addressee orientation
• Only for German, not for French and Spanish texts!

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Interpretation

• Did communicative norms change because of direct
  contact with English in translation?
• Mono-causal interpretation of results too easy.
  Also in some cases, originals change more than
  translations! At least three explanations

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1. The Booh-Faktor Translation as Mediator of
the English Take-over

• Translation EFFECTS change!

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2. The X-Faktor Universal Impact of
Globalisation Translation reflector of change,
not instigator thereof

• Translation REFLECTS change!

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3. The Green Factor Translation as cultural
conservation

• Translation RESISTS change!

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(3) Psycholinguistic Perspective (Linguistic
Relativity)

• Claims that masssive import of English lexis
  influences thinking and concept formation in L1
  is compatible with strong Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf
  Hypothesis
• Accordingly, L1 speakers thinking is exposed to
  acts of organized violence through ELF, which
  damages their L1- mediated knowledge

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This strong linguistic relativity hypothesis can
be refuted for at least three reasons

• 1. The universal possibility of translation
  (Jakobson 1966)
• 2. Languages in use are anachronisms their
  forms do not normally rise to our consciousness
  (Ortega y Gasset 1960)
• 3. Converging evidence suggests that
  multilinguals possess a deep common conceptual
  store to which lower level language-specific
  systems are attached (Grosjean 2001
  Myers-Scotton 2006)

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• Neurolinguistic studies of translation (e.g.
  Altarriba 1992 Price et al 1999) show
  multilinguals move flexibly from L1 to L2, and
  L2-L1, the two systems being distinct but
  permeable.
• With experts, processing often shallow, i.e.,
  no semantic-conceptual processing at all (Sanford
  Graesser 2006).
• No proof of a direct link of only one particular
  language to thinking and conceptualizing.
• Consequence Increased use of ELF as language at
  tertiary levels of education must not necessarily
  inhibit knowledge in students indigenous
  language.

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3. Conclusion

• ELF not necessarily a threat to multilingualism.
  Useful tool for communication, additional
  language, never a substitute for L1s.
• Neurolinguistic studies of translation and
  code-switching do not confirm that ELF inhibits
  or damages conceptualization in L1
• ELF is both a pheno- and a geno-typically hybrid
  language Transfer from L1 widespread. ELF users
  
• L1s live on underneath the English surface!

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• Because of ELF speakers inner dialogicity
  evaluation norms should not be L1 English
  speakers competence, but multilingual ELF
  experts.
• Influence of ELF on German, but not French and
  Spanish, communicative norms, confirmed for
  specific linguistic forms, origin however unclear.

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• Association of ELF with global US economic power.
  English language is but an instrument.
• Power via language may lead to deplorable
  sameness, e.g. in service encounters in global
  chains (Cameron 2000). But Mounting resistance!
• Challenge to the academy instead of blaming ELF
  from academic distance, research that may help
  expose and change real social and political
  injustice, discrimination and oppression.

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Thank you very much!