Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4, 2003: 556578

English as a lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism?

Juliane House
Hamburg University, Germany
In this paper I argue against the widespread assumption that the English language in its role as lingua franca is a serious threat to national languages and to multilingualism. I support this argument by making a distinction between `languages for communication' and `languages for identication'. Further support for the stance against one-sidedly attacking English as a killer language will be drawn from the ndings of three research projects currently being carried out at Hamburg University, one on the impact English has on discourse norms in inuential genres in other languages; the second one on the nature of interactions in English as a lingua franca; and the third one on so-called `international degree programmes', in which English is the language of instruction. Finally, I make some tentative suggestions for a new research paradigm for English as a lingua franca.

KEYWORDS: English as lingua franca, language for communication, language for identication, covert translation, social macro-acquisition, community of practice

In this paper I question the widespread assumption that English in its role as a lingua franca is a serious threat to multilingualism in Europe and elsewhere, and develop an argument against it. I support this argument by making a distinction between `languages for communication' and `languages for identication' and by drawing on the ndings of three research projects currently being carried out at Hamburg University. In conclusion, I make some suggestions for a new research paradigm for English as a lingua franca (ELF), which may more adequately handle the impact English, in this role, is having on national languages worldwide. Firstly, I consider what is to be understood by a `lingua franca', what this term might mean with regard to the status of global English today, and what relevant research exists on ELF interactions.

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1. WHAT IS A LINGUA FRANCA? DEFINITIONS AND STATE OF THE ART IN LINGUA FRANCA RESEARCH In its original meaning, a lingua franca the term comes from Arabic `lisan-alfarang' was simply an intermediary language used by speakers of Arabic with travellers from Western Europe. Its meaning was later extended to describe a language of commerce, a rather stable variety with little room for individual variation. This meaning is clearly not applicable to today's global English, whose major characteristics are its functional exibility and its spread across many dierent domains. These two features have led to another new and indeed remarkable feature: that the number of non-native speakers is substantially larger than its native speakers (the relationship is about four to one, cf. Graddol 1997). English is thus no longer `owned' by its native speakers, and there is a strong tendency towards more rapid `de-owning' not least because of the increasing frequency with which non-native speakers use ELF in international contacts. But exactly how does ELF dier from native English? Is it a language for specic purposes, a pidgin, or is it a particular type of interlanguage? Clearly, ELF is neither a language for specic purposes nor a pidgin, because it is not a restricted code, but a language showing full linguistic and functional range (Kachru 1997) and serving as a `contact language between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common national culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication' (Firth 1996: 240). In an attempt to dene a lingua franca from a formal perspective, Gramkow Andersen (1993) oers a denition that characterizes ELF in the following way: `There is no consistency in form that goes beyond the participant level, i.e., each combination of interactants seems to negotiate and govern their own variety of lingua franca use in terms of prociency level, use of code-mixing, degree of pidginization, etc.' (Gramkow Andersen 1993: 108). Here we have the most important ingredients of a lingua franca: negotiability, variability in terms of speaker prociency, and openness to an integration of forms of other languages.1 All this reminds one, of course, of an `interlanguage': a concept rst introduced by Selinker as `the observable output resulting from a speaker's attempt to produce a foreign norm, i.e., both his errors and non-errors. It is assumed that such behaviour is highly structured . . . and that it must be dealt with as a system, not as an isolated collection of errors' (Selinker 1969: fn. 5). The salient concepts here are `foreign norm', `errors', `non-errors', `system' and, by implication, `the native speaker' (whose competence is the yardstick for deviations from a norm and for system-errors). It is vis-a-vis these concepts that the dierential approach to ELF can now be outlined: rst, ELF talk cannot be conceived with a view to an ideal English norm, and the ELF speaker cannot be measured in his/her competence vis-a-vis `the native speaker'. A lingua franca speaker is not per denitionem not fully competent in the part of his/her linguistic knowledge under study. Second, the object of inquiry for ELF is not a
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psycholinguistic `in between-system' developing inside a speaker on his/her way to full mastery of the English language system; that is, the perspective is not one with a view to development towards becoming a `proper member' of another speech community.2 More adequate for ELF than the interlanguage framework is the multilingual speaker possessing what Cook (1993) has called `multicompetence', that is, a distinctive state of mind, unlike a nal stage of knowledge like the native monolingual's competence. The focus is here on the possession of more than one set of linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge in one and the same individual, on language use rather than on development and acquisition, and on the socio-pragmatic functions of language choice. To be fair, Selinker (1992), when he `re-discovered' interlanguage twenty years later, mentioned the issue of `World Englishes' characterizing these varieties in terms of `fossilization' on a cline to nativisation, and in terms of cultural and contextual transfer, but he also pointed to the need to discover `non-native varieties of the international language English'. From the perspective of pragmatics and discourse studies, ELF discourse as one type of non-nativenon-native interaction has been examined with a focus on how meaning is negotiated with the help of those unstable and varying resources available to ELF interactants. This interactional approach is concerned with social rather than individual psychological phenomena, and it focuses on language use. The lingua franca concept is useful particularly when contrasted with the more ideologically fused cognates such as `foreigner talk' or `learner interaction', because one here `attempts to conceptualize the participant simply as a language user whose real-world interactions are deserving of unprejudiced description rather than as a person conceived a priori to be the possessor of incomplete or decient communicative competence, putatively striving for the `target' competence of an idealized `native speaker' (Firth 1996: 241). One of the few empirical studies on ELF talk was conducted by Firth (1996) and his associates. They analysed ELF telephone conversations between employees of Danish companies and their foreign partners supplementing their analyses with ethnographic information. In their ndings, the authors stress above all the `eeting' nature of ELF talk, the uidity of norms reecting participants' insecurity regarding which norms are operative. They also point to ELF interactants' attempts to `normalize' potential trouble sources, rather than attend to them explicitly via repair initiation, reformulation, etc. As long as a certain threshold of understanding is achieved, ELF participants appear to adopt a principle of `Let it pass', an interpretive procedure which makes the interactional style both `robust' and explicitly consensual. While one might assume that such a procedure endangers eective communication, as the supercial consensus may well mask deeper sources of trouble arising out of dierences in culturally based knowledge frames, lingua franca talk turns out to be, in fact, basically meaningful and `ordinary'. Unclear talk is routinely `passed
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over' on the common sense assumption that it will either eventually become clear or end up as redundant. The robustness of the talk is strengthened by a remarkable number of joint discourse productions. All these strategies seem to show that ELF users are competent enough to be able to monitor each others' moves at a high level of awareness. The results of this work are basically compatible with Meierkord's (1996) ndings. She analysed audiotaped English dinner-table conversations elicited in a British student residence from subjects of many dierent L1 backgrounds. Meierkord compared the structural characteristics of her ELF data with relevant ndings from the literature on nativenative and nativenon-native talk. She found that ELF users employed a reduced repertoire of tokens, used shorter turns and much more non-verbal communication in comparison to her native English sample. But, like Firth, she also established in her analyses a certain `robustness' of the ELF talk. More recently, Lesznyak (2002) analysed an ELF interaction at an international students' meeting in the Netherlands, comparing it with equivalent baseline interactions by groups of native speakers of English, Hungarian and German, and an interaction between English native speakers and speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL). She found that ELF users (as opposed to EFL speakers) seemed to follow a dynamic model of topic management, and engaged in a process of gradually nding common ground, of negotiating footing and communicative rules such that their initially divergent (`chaotic') behaviour became consensually transformed into convergent behavioural patterns. ELF interactants in Lesznyak's data work out the rules for their particular encounter zeroing in on a shared interpretation of the social situation they are nding themselves in. In sum then, ELF appears to be neither a restricted language for special purposes, nor a pidgin, nor an interlanguage, but one of a repertoire of dierent communicative instruments an individual has at his/her disposal, a useful and versatile tool, a `language for communication'. As such it can be distinguished from those other parts of the individual's repertoire which serve as `language(s) for identication' (Hullen 1992). In the following section I will elaborate on this distinction which is a functional one, and is in line with my view of language as a means to full certain functions in human experience a view uniting both cognitive-individual and social foci on language. 2. LANGUAGES FOR COMMUNICATION VERSUS LANGUAGES FOR IDENTIFICATION: SOME SOCIO-POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS ELF can be regarded as a language for communication, that is, a useful instrument for making oneself understood in international encounters. It is instrumental in enabling communication with others who do not speak one's own L1.3 In ELF use, speakers must continuously work out a joint basis for their interactions, locally construing and intersubjectively ratifying meanings. In
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using ELF, speakers are unlikely to conceive of it as a `language for identication': it is local languages, and particularly an individual's L1(s), which are likely to be the main determinants of identity, which means holding a stake in the collective linguistic-cultural capital that denes the L1 group and its members. Kramsch (2002) gives a beautiful example of the distinction between using language for communicative purposes and using it for identicatory purposes, and the type of aective-emotive quality involved in identication. She quotes from an autobiography of a speaker of Vietnamese as L1: `As for English I do speak the language but I don't think I'll ever talk it. English ows 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 ows 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: 9899). Linguistically determined identity need not be unitary and xed, but can be multi-faceted, non-unitary and contradictory (Norton 2000), when an individual speaks more than one language. Because ELF is not a national language, but a mere tool bereft of collective cultural capital, it is a language usable neither for identity marking, nor for a positive (`integrative') disposition toward an L2 group, nor for a desire to become similar to valued members of this L2 group simply because there is no denable group of ELF speakers.4 ELF users, then, use ELF as a transactional language for their own communicative purposes and advantage. Such a largely utilitarian motive seems to me to be incompatible with viewing ELF users as I take, for example, Phillipson (1992) to do as `pawns' in an imperialistic game, where formerly militaristic and colonial inroads are now linguistically replayed. There is a sad truth behind de Swaan's (2001) assessment of the (politically correct) ght against `linguistic imperialism', `linguicism' and the proclamation of everybody's right to speak the language of their choice. `Alas', he writes, `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' (2001: 52). If one wants to communicate beyond one's own local circle, one will have to (and often want to) learn a language which links one with wider circles of communication, with a language with a high `communication value (Q-value)' (de Swaan 2001: 33.). Using ELF for instrumental purposes does not necessarily displace national or local languages, as they are used for dierent purposes. As Bisong (1995) points out with reference to Nigeria, English performs a useful function in this multilingual society, and it is no longer perceived as an `imperial language' to be learnt at all costs. In Nigeria, English has become one of the languages available for use, and it is its communication potential which makes people decide to use English. Arguments such as the ones brought forward by Phillipson and others may be seen as patronising since they imply that ELF users do not know what is in their interest. In support of this argument, I can
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refer to the case of my native Germany where English in its role as a language with a `high communication value' was welcomed by many after World War II, not least because of its (maybe nave) association with democratic statehood. In West Germany, English was embraced wholeheartedly as a means of helping people forget the past. A similar process is currently taking place in Eastern Europe, where English is welcomed as an auxiliary language and as a means to discard Russian, which had been imposed, but eventually failed, as a language of inter-state communication. Clashes and conicts of loyalty between native languages and Russian often occurred in the former Soviet Union. The fear fuelled by some that a hegemonic language would squash native languages was therefore most certainly true of Russian in the Soviet Empire and its satellites in the case of English, the situation is dierent. Paradoxical as this may seem, the very spread of ELF may stimulate members of minority languages to insist on their own local language for emotional binding to their own culture, history and tradition, and there is, indeed, a strong countercurrent to the spread of ELF in that local varieties and cultural practices are often strengthened. One example is the revival of German language folk music, songs in local dialects such as Bavarian to counteract pop music in English only. Using ELF as a medium of border-crossing to set up as many expert communities as necessary in science, economics, education, etc. cannot be seen as encroaching on established `roots'. As has happened in many parts of the world before, a diglossia situation is now developing in Europe English for various `pockets of expertise' and nonprivate communication on the one hand, and national and local varieties for aective, identicatory purposes on the other hand. As a language with a high communicative value, ELF has naturally acquired a special status in the European Union (EU) that sets it o from all other EU languages. But this status has been consistently tabooed. In the absence of any explicit EU language policy, a `mute immobility in matters of language prepares the ground for a stampede towards English' (de Swaan 2001: 171). It is also an open secret that the EU's supposedly humane multilingualism is but an illusion. Firstly, the EU recognizes one and only one ocial language for every member state, a position at variance with the EU's ocial display of respect for the language rights of each and every minority language group in Europe. Secondly, some languages in the EU are (and have always been) more equal than others: from the outset, French, supported by an aggressive language policy, has held a singularly privileged position as the only ocial language of the EU's precursor, and as an important language spoken in all three major EU domiciles. Since the French privilege is now being threatened, there is a erce rivalry between French and English, but English has in fact become the EU's lingua franca (de Swaan 2001: 174). The illusion of multilingualism in the EU, and the lip-service paid to the ideal of a multiplicity of languages, is also costly and cumbersome; witness the unwieldy machinery of translation, which will probably be de facto impossible
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once there are 27 or more member states. In Koskinen's (2000) insider experience, the EU commission's translation bureau, the largest in the world, translates the EU's illusion of equality into an illusion of facile translatability. The value of translation is that of a living symbol of the high ideal of equality, that is, it is important that a translation exists, not what it is like and what it does. According to Koskinen, translators often suspect that no one ever reads their nished translation. Important working papers are quickly read in English; by the time the translations are ready, the new information is old information simply because for a translation to come into being, there has to be an original. Inherent in a translation, therefore, is its delayed nature. Many also doubt the translations' accuracy and openly prefer to read the more reliable English (and French) originals. Another curious feature of EU translations is that they are often not marked as translations as though a translation were but a version of `the same thing' critically dismissing real-life cultural dierences that need to be taken account of in a process of `cultural ltering' (House 1997). The EU's ostensible multilingualism (and its particularly strong resistance to adopting ELF, cf. the analysis in Fishman 1996) is one of its key characteristics, which also sets it apart from many other international organizations. Instead of having openly opted for a manageable number of working languages, all the ocial languages of the member states have been given equal status. With the increased number of member states, this policy is a serious problem, a problem which could be solved by adopting ELF for the EU. Once the position of English as the vehicular language were recognized, resources would be freed for supporting all other European languages. ELF would need to be taught intensively and early on as a true second language. More money and time could then be allotted for teaching and otherwise supporting other European languages (especially minority languages) in a exible fashion, tailor-made to regionally and locally diering needs. If one makes the distinction between languages for communication, such as English today, and languages for identication mother tongues, regional, local, intimate varieties of language ELF need not be a threat. It can be seen as strengthening the complementary need for native local languages that are rooted in their speakers' shared history, cultural tradition, practices, conventions, and values as identicatory potential. To support this argument as well as the line of argumentation followed throughout this section, there follows a brief outline of three empirical research projects currently being conducted at Hamburg University. 3. SOME RELEVANT RESEARCH FINDINGS 3.1 The project `Covert translation' Given the widespread use of ELF in many domains of contemporary life, one must ask whether ELF's omnipresence may not result in changes in the local languages used alongside English. It is well known that there has been, for
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decades, a massive inux of English words and collocations into many other languages. However annoying this is for the purists, these lexical loans and direct translations, which are most conspicuous in domains such as media, advertising, life style, youth culture etc., might be brushed o as `only' aecting the `open system' of lexis leaving the `heart of a language', its structure, intact. In Germany, for instance, most people are used to hearing strange new routines such as `Lass mich allein' (Leave me alone) instead of the conventional `Lass mich in Ruh'. And although Germans are faced with a growing number of crude direct translations such as `Hartwarenhaus' (Hardware store), an alien word in German, and innumerable English lexical items in German texts like `department', `share holder value', etc., such English inserts are probably as transient as they are innocuous. But what about the more hidden, but nevertheless much more serious inuence of the English language on textual norms in other languages? In a research project currently conducted at Hamburg University and funded by the German Science Foundation at its Centre on Multilingualism (cf. House 2002a), this very question is being investigated: whether and how ELF inuences textual norms in covert translation and parallel text production. In a covert translation, the function the source text has in its local source language context is maintained, and this maintenance is achieved through the use of a `cultural lter' with which culture-specic textual norms in the source language community are adapted to conventional norms in the `receiving' language community.5 Given the ubiquity of ELF, this adaptation process may now be in a process of change. We therefore ask whether crosscultural dierence in textualisation conventions gives way to similarity in these conventions, and whether a process is underway which may eventually result in cross-culturally similar processes of text production. The global hypothesis underlying this project is therefore that German (French, Spanish, etc.)6 textual norms are adapted to anglophone ones. These adaptations can be located along parameters of culturally determined communicative preferences such as preferred foci on the interpersonal or the ideational function, and on informational vagueness or specicity as they have emerged from my own GermanEnglish contrastive work (e.g. House 2003) and many other comparative studies (e.g. Clyne 1987). Parametrical changes may also entail `anglicisation' in terms of information structure or word order, for example. Concretely, we have set up several working hypotheses referring to a shift from a conventionally strong `content-orientation' and informational explicitness of German texts to an anglophone `addressee orientation', inference-inducing implicitness and propositional opaqueness. The work also considers shifts in information structure from packing lexical information integratively and hierarchically to presenting information in a more loosely linear, `sentential' way. These hypotheses are tested using a dynamic, implicitly diachronic translation and parallel text corpus of some 500 texts (with a core corpus consisting of about 90,000 words and a monitor corpus consisting of about 410,000 words). At present, this corpus contains texts from three genres: economic texts from
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globalized companies; popular science; and computer texts. It is made up of three parts: a primary corpus comprising original English texts and their published translations into German; a parallel corpus comprising authentic (i.e. non-translated) texts in English and other relevant languages from the same three genres; and a validation corpus holding translations from the same three genres in the `opposite direction', that is, from German etc. into English. It also has interviews with translators, editors, writers and other persons involved in text production and reception. To further enrich our analyses we have collected English and German texts similar in topic orientation which have appeared in the recently established parallel editions of newspapers, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung/International Herald Tribune. We have so far followed a case study approach involving in-depth analysis and comparison of textual exemplars, that is, English source texts and German translations as well as pairs of parallel texts. The analyses follow House's translation model (1997), which is based on Hallidayan systemic-functional theory, register linguistics, discourse analysis and text linguistics. They are carried out both from a micro- and a macro-perspective, and their ultimate goal is to reconstruct (and compare) the types of motivated choices text producers made in order to create this, and only this, text for a particular eect, a particular audience, in particular `contexts of situation', and to establish the extent to which `cultural ltering' has taken place. Tentative results of the analyses of some 60 English and German translational pairs and parallel texts as well as some 15 interviews show that our hypothesis is basically not conrmed. Widespread borrowing of English lexical items and routines is not accompanied by changes in the make-up of German texts: German and English texts dier in their `interpersonal' orientation (or `involvement' in the sense of Biber 1988) as they did 30 years ago (House 1977). In German texts, `addressee orientation' still functions dierently from the way it does in anglophone texts. There is, for instance, a preference for a `didactic manner of information presentation' in the German texts with frequent elaboration of information. Consider the following extracts from the journal Scientic American and its German satellite publication Spektrum der Wissenschaft. (I have provided English glosses (back translations, BT) of the German translation to ease comprehension.) The German translations in Spektrum der Wissenschaft were produced by in-house translators.
Excerpt 1 M. Gazzaniga `The split brain revisited' (Scientic American July 1998) `Rechtes und linkes Gehirn: Split-Brain und Bewutsein' (Spektrum der Wissenschaft Dezember 1998) (BT: Right and left brain: Split-brain and consciousness)

1 2 1

Groundbreaking work that began more than a quarter of a century ago has led to ongoing insights about brain organization and consciousness. Jahrzehntelange Studien an Patienten mit chirurgisch getrennten
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2 Grohirnhalften haben das Verstandnis fur den funktionellen Aufbau des 3 Gehirns und das Wesen des Bewutseins vertieft. (BT: Decade-long studies on patients with surgically separated brain hemispheres have deepened the understanding of the functional organization of the brain and the essence of consciousness.)

Excerpt 1 shows how the German translator elaborates the information content by pre-empting imaginary reader questions about specic circumstantial elements of extent, location in time and place, manner, etc. The English text shows a tendency towards `genre mixing', that is, using mechanisms which readers know from journalism, advertising, sermons and other persuasively oriented genres. The eect of this hybridisation can be seen in overt `addressee involvement', and the creation of `human interest' by drawing readers into the institutional context in which the writer operates thus oering readers possibilities of identication. In the English popular science texts, this is often achieved through mental process (in the sense of Halliday) imperatives in initial parts of the texts, which then frame the entire text. This framing eect is not replicated in the German translation. Consider Excerpt 2:
Excerpt 2 S. Buchbinder `Avoiding infection after HIV exposure' (Scientic American July 1998) `Pravention nach HIV-Kontakt' (Spektrum der Wissenschaft Oktober 1998) (BT: Prevention after HIV-contact)

1 2 3 4 5 6

Suppose you are a doctor in an emergency room and a patient tells you she was raped two hours earlier. She is afraid she may have been exposed to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS but has heard that there is a `morning-after pill' to prevent HIV infection. Can you in fact do anything to block the virus from replicating and establishing infection?

1 In der Notfallaufnahme eines Krankenhauses berichtet eine Patientin 2 sie sei vor zwei Stunden vergewaltigt worden 3 und nun in Sorge, dem AIDS-Erreger ausgesetzt zu sein, 4 sie habe aber gehort, es gebe eine `Pille danach', 5 die eine HIV-Infektion verhute. 6 Kann der Arzt uberhaupt irgendetwas tun, 7 was eventuell vorhandene Viren hindern wurde, 8 sich zu vermehren und sich dauerhaft im Korper einzunisten? (BT: In the emergency room of a hospital a patient reports that she had been raped two hours ago and was now worrying that she had been exposed to the AIDS-virus. She said she had heard that there was an `after-pill', which might prevent an HIV-infection. Can the doctor in fact do anything which might prevent potentially existing virusses from replicating and establishing themselves permanently in the body?)

The German translation in Excerpt 2 is obviously culturally ltered: the

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strategies of addressee-involvement in the English text, as well as oers to the addressees to identify themselves with agents in the text (lines 1 and 5) are not replicated in German, that is, German generic conventions are upheld. That this `resistance' is a conscious one, was documented in the interviews with translators and editors: the tendency towards `humanising' textual material in English popular science texts (via framing techniques, personal deixis, mood switches, etc.) is consciously shunned in favour of a more `rational', more `scientic' (`more German') character of texts in this genre, then and now deeply anchored in cultural tradition. Our ndings in this project show that the types of pragmatic shift or `cultural ltering' conventionally undertaken as texts travel through time and space are exactly what they were before. There are no changes in addressee-orientation, no modications along those parameters of cultural dierence which I hypothesized on the basis of contrastive work. German discourse norms, and, judging by the few analyses of translations from English into French, Spanish and Portuguese we conducted, also local discourse norms in other European languages, remain uninuenced by ELF. However, preliminary analyses of most recent textual specimens do seem to point to a change in the expression of `subjectivity' and `stance', addressee-orientation and genre mixing. But, before we are justied in speaking of a `trend change', much more quantitative, diachronic corpus research is necessary. This will be the next step in this project. 3.2 The project `Communicating in English as a lingua franca'7 In this project we are looking at the nature of ELF interactions between speakers of dierent L1s. We have collected data from international students at Hamburg University (age 2535), from many dierent L1 backgrounds, who were asked to interact amongst themselves and with members of the support sta of Hamburg University. The data was elicited in a mixture of authentic and simulated ELF interactions as well as in more experimental set-ups. It contains: (1) ELF interactions (groups of 4 international students); (2) comparable native English interactions (groups of 4 L1 English speakers); (3) comparable ELF interactions (groups of 4 interactants with English and German as L1s); (4) dyadic interactions between international students and support sta; and (5) retrospective interviews eliciting interactants' metapragmatic assessments. I will here present some selected results of the analysis of parts of data type (1) (one 30 minute group interaction) complemented by data type (5). Participants were two female and two male native speakers of German (Brit), Korean ( Joy), Chinese (Wei) and Indonesian (Mauri).8 As a stimulus for the ensuing talk, they were given an article from a German weekly on the role of ELF. The interaction was taped and transcribed, and each of the four participants was asked to give retrospective feedback two weeks later. Participants listened to the talk, read the transcripts, and were asked to comment on `critical points' revealed in the
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preceding analysis those parts of the interaction that pointed to imminent interactional trouble. The analysis was conducted on the basis of a model of spoken discourse and the analytic categories provided therein (Edmondson 1981; Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989).9 The following trends of ELF discourse behaviour have emerged from both the analysis and the post hoc interviews. In line with the literature discussed above, we found remarkably few misunderstandings10 and a concomitant multitude of `Let it pass'. As opposed to the many misunderstandings I detected in my analyses of nativenon-native talk (e.g. see House 2003), this ELF talk seems to be qualitatively dierent in nature. This impression is based on three specic ndings: Finding one. Although interactants seem to transfer foreign (L1) conventions into the ELF discourse, this does not lead to misunderstandings. For instance, the three Asian participants employ topic management strategies in a striking way, recycling a specic topic regardless of where and how the discourse had developed at any particular point. This behaviour makes the entire interaction resemble a set of parallel monologues with each participant following his/her own macro-theme, the result being a gross under-attuning of individual turns. But despite this behaviour on the part of three of the four interactants, communication does not break down. Excerpt 3 exemplies the `monologic tracks' followed by the Asian students. (I have included the previous speaker's turn, so as to better show the type of nonsequitur that occurs due to interactants' insistence in pulling the conversation towards their particular pet topic.) Mauri's topic or leitmotif is `business' (half of Mauri's 24 turns are devoted to this topic):
Excerpt 3 Wei: They don't have tradition to learn sorry to learn German perhaps Japanese a little bit tradition @ but not German Mauri: Yes the importance of language meaning depends on business erm (2 sec) issues (2 sec) the more important the business issue the more you have to learn this language because all the people use this language if you cannot speak in this language you lost and you have to so I think it's begins erm of course with the colonialism I think too because the history of this development how the language in very early period Joy: Mauri: Yes I think so and non-native norms because there are (2 sec) a lot of norms language norms and I think it's very dicult in reality to understand people from the other countries other culture backgrounds Also language erm (3 sec) the languages develop itselves so maybe if you don't stay in the countries so you cannot erm, you cannot erm (2 sec) get with this development I think so if you just use this language English as business language . . . .

The idiocratic type of turn coherence in Excerpt 3 seems to result from a

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single-minded pursuance of Mauri's individual script. Although I do not speak of the L1s involved and have not collected relevant baseline data and cannot pretend to have conducted even a rudimentary contrastive analysis, I do have participants' retrospective subjective interpretations and metapragmatic assessments. Relevant here is Mauri's comment. He suggested that his topic recycling may stem from transfer of native Indonesian conventions of discourse construction in which topics are cyclically re-introduced, very much in the way Kaplan (1966) suggests in his much-maligned `Doodles' article. Joy also conrmed this explanation of the culturally determined topic management in this data. Finding two. A second nding in this data refers to the remarkably frequent use of a particular discourse marker: the Represent (Edmondson 1981). It is used, as its name suggests, to `re-present' the previous speaker's move in order to aid the present speaker's working memory in both his/her comprehension and production processes, to provide textual coherence, to signal uptake, to request conrmation, or to indicate to the previous speaker that there is no intention to `steal' his/her turn. Represents, also known in the literature as `echoing', `mirroring', or `shadowing' devices, occur in many dierent genres such as therapeutic interviews, educational talk and aviation control discourse. They are multifunctional discourse lubricants, acting simultaneously as an encapsulation of previously given information and as a new instantiation creating linkage across turns through redundancy and the construction of lexical paradigmatic clusters. But Represents can also act as meta-communicative procedures and as such serve to reinforce metalinguistic awareness in participants a very useful function in ELF talk given the linguistic fragility of this genotypically multilingual discourse. Consider Excerpts 4 and 5:
Excerpt 4 Brit: And if erm things like Nigerian English, Indian English which is a sort of variety in itself it should be respected Mauri: Should be respected Excerpt 5 Joy: And you mean that English (2 sec) is really getting important or taken for the education because the grammar is syntactical erm the grammar is very [easy] Wei: [is easy] is very easy

In her interview, Joy suggested that the frequency of Represents may not only stem from interactants' attempt to support their own working memory and facilitate processing, but may also be a sign of `Asian politeness', where an explicitly verbalised acknowledgement of the interlocutor's message counts as part of being polite. Wei contradicted this view stating that he used repetition to help himself onto his own response, but Mauri declared that it is more important in a dicussion to reach some sort of consensus than to give direct
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answers to particular questions. In order to assess the validity of these dierent interpretations of the functions of Represents in this data, analyses of a larger corpus are clearly needed. At the present time, no conclusive answer can be given. Finding three. We also found a strong demonstration of solidarity and consensus-orientation in this data, especially on the part of the Asian participants who, despite their mono-thematic monologues, also manage to cooperate, and co-construct utterances in a display of solidarity the solidarity of non-native ELF speakers. Consider Excerpt 6:
Excerpt 6 Mauri: 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 the basis Mauri: Yes Joy: To be a world language Mauri: Yes

Such collaborative discourse production as evident in Excerpt 6 is so frequent in my data that it may well be its most important feature. Interestingly, it is only Brit, the German speaker, who tried to pierce the bubble of apparent mutual intelligibility and overt collaboration. In her interview, Brit stated she had felt there was a certain `Asian style' of consensus-orientation, that is, a tendency to ignore potentially troublesome remarks, and to resist argumentative talk in which interactants' moves might be challenged. Brit was particularly struck by the fact that her (provocative) questions were simply not answered! The fact that Brit longed for more argumentative talk can also be taken as conrming transfer of her German interactional preferences preferences hypothesized in a series of contrastive GermanEnglish pragmatic analyses (see above p. 564), one of them referring to a particular emphasis on transactional versus phatic talk. The consensus orientation evident in Asian students' discourse behaviour in this ELF data could be interpreted with reference to Tajfel's (1981) assumption of a continuum of interpersonal and group identity, such that one might posit a focus on group identity. However, the individualgroup dichotomy may be too simplistic: speakers of L1s such as Korean, German, Indonesian and Chinese in my data are, when using ELF, individuals who tend to transfer their L1 discourse conventions into their ELF talk while at the same time constructing something as uid and immaterial as the `community of ELF speakers', a consortium that is always constituted anew in any ongoing talk. In sum then and despite the diculty of separating ELF speakers' L1 transfer from their restricted ELF competences I would hypothesize rstly that ELF users' native culture-conditioned ways of interacting are `alive' in the medium of the English language. The second hypothesis would be that despite the
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resulting diversity of `voices' in the medium of English, or maybe because using a common code for communication unites ELF speakers as non-native speakers (`We're all in the same boat') ELF appears to be a useful communicative tool. While ELF users may certainly need to improve their `pragmatic uency' (House 1996b), their strategic competence is arguably intact, and it is this strategic competence which enables ELF speakers to engage in meaningful negotiation. 3.3 The project `English as a medium of instruction in German universities' In this project recently started at Hamburg University (Motz in press), we are investigating how English, now increasingly used as a medium of instruction in German universities, interacts with the domestic German language, and how international students perceive, and react to, this `diglossic situation'. The background for this research is the unprecedented case in German society that national universities are instituting courses of study which no longer use German as the language of instruction. Using English in tertiary education is, of course, one important dimension of `anglication'. While ELF in tertiary education is common in former British and American colonies and their spheres of inuence (Fishman 1996: 637), there is now a new trend of also using ELF in European tertiary education. In the German context, this is rstly a reection of the generally balanced attitude of the German intellectual elite towards ELF (Ammon 2001), which is of course in stark contrast to the French elite's view of ELF (Flaitz 1988). Secondly, it is a result of German universities' attempt to internationalise German universities and attract more (paying!) foreign students, whose number has been steadily decreasing. Universities have recently reacted to this attrition by introducing `international degree programmes', where English is either the sole medium of instruction or is used alongside German, the latter being oered in special (mostly intensive) language courses. The project involves an investigation of how the fact that English is used in the academic environment while German is used in everyday life, aects students' motivation to study, their actual use of either language and their view of this situation. Data has been collected inside a Master of European Studies programme and consists of several parts: (1) relevant background documents; (2) observations of instruction followed by retrospective interviews; (3) interviews with international students eliciting self-assessments of previous language learning experience and the `two languages situation'; (4) diary studies with a small sample of students; and (5) students' self-taped authentic everyday interactions with dierent German interlocutors. Preliminary results of the analyses of this data suggest that students prefer initial instruction in `English only' followed by a gradual progression to German as the medium of instruction, if and when their competence in German allows for such a transition. Students' self-assessments of their needs and perceptions of this `two language situation' are in line with the new ocial policy followed by the German Academic Exchange Service, where such a `gentle' progression
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from ELF to German is now also ocially favoured. As opposed to `English only' programmes, such a progression helps increase the attractiveness of the national language both as an academic medium and a tool for surviving in everyday German life. The interviews reveal that English is seen by teachers and students both as a useful means of easing communication in initial stages and as a useful (permanent) stand-by for solving potential communication problems. English is not really seen as being in competition to German; it is described as `a class of its own', a supranational, auxiliary means of communication. To sum up, all three research projects cannot be interpreted as indicating that there is a serious encroachment of ELF upon a native language: in translation and parallel text production, native norms are upheld; ELF interactions show phenotypical (and maybe genotypical) L1 presence; and, in English-medium instruction, moves are made to involve local language use. Clearly, however, more research in this new eld of inquiry is necessary if research is to match, and indeed provide some guidance for, the global use of English as a language for communication. Below, I make some suggestions for a new research paradigm. They derive, either directly or indirectly, from the results of the work described above and the assessment of the role of ELF given in the rst part of this paper. 4. ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: TOWARDS A NEW RESEARCH PARADIGM There are three signicant points: 1. Instead of being caught in the tunnel vision of looking at ELF inside the interlanguage framework, which focuses on learners' decits in native speaker competence, it is more fruitful to look at ELF both from a micro-(individual) perspective and from a macro-(social) perspective. Social `macro-acquisition' (Brutt-Grier 2002: 135 .) implies that the origin and result of ELF acquisition and use are social processes, which arise out of the socio-historical conditions of language spread and may lead to language change. The primary input is not coming from native speakers but from a group of speakers who can be characterized as sharing a multilingual habitus and multilingual communicative competence. Models of language learning and use which stress the importance of social processes aecting individuals are in line with early Russian theories of language learning and use as suggested by Galperin (1980). In his cultural-historical `interiorisation theory', psycholinguistic processes develop in the interaction of the individual with other speakers in dierent contexts, such that events and states of aairs in the external world are `taken inside' to construct a mental reality that is both individual and socially shared.11 Reconsidering this social acquisition theory may be of benet for ELF research.
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2. Rejecting the venerable psycholinguistic concept of an `interlanguage' as a basis for conceptualizing ELF nds its parallel in the rejection of the established sociolinguistic concept of the `speech community' in its various senses: from Fishman's view that a `speech community (a term probably translated from the German Sprachgemeinschaft) is one, all of whose members share at least one single speech variety and the norms for its appropriate use' (1971: 232) a view basically shared by Hymes (1972: 53); to Labov's (1972: 120) interpretation of the speech community as located in a population on the basis of variation in use and regularity of judgement of some key linguistic features; to Preston's (1989) proposal that speech communities are united by speakers' shared beliefs about their own language and the language of outgroups; to Kerswill (1993), who added the criteria of the speaker's nativeness inside a speech community and the closely related nature, at all linguistic levels, of the language spoken by the population. All these conceptions of the `speech community' are inappropriate for capturing the ELF phenomenon. And even the much more `open' and exible speech community model suggested by Santa Ana and Parodi (1998) is inappropriate in ELF research: their model of nested speech-community congurations which consists of a multi-eld speech community typology based on degrees of recognition of sociolinguistic norms and characterized by specic linguistic variables, still suggests that speakers are essentially placeable in a particular conguration. Despite their variation, all models of the speech community still have as a common thread as Holmes and Meyerho rightly point out a `sense that a speech community is a way of being' (1999: 178). It is this dependence on essential social and/or behavioural properties which speakers can be said to possess in a relatively stable or homogeneous way, which makes the concept of the speech community inappropriate for the description of ELF communication, whose characteristic it is that each individual moves in and out of a variety of contexts, which are likely to have quite dierent forms of participation. Instead of basing ELF research on the notion of the speech community, we may therefore consider another sociolinguistic concept, the concept of `community of practice'. Wenger's (1998: 76) three dimensions characterising a community of practice: mutual engagement, a joint negotiated enterprise, and a shared repertoire of negotiable resources, may indeed be applicable to ELF interactions. Mutual engagement as a precondition that makes a community of practice possible surely exists in the types of ELF interaction described above. Further, ELF interactions are both `joint enterprises' and `negotiated enterprises' in that participants enter into collaborative meaning negotiations. As opposed to monolingual communities of practice, the `enterprise' in ELF talk is to successfully negotiate on the content plane (reach a common goal) and on the level of linguistic (English) forms. The `shared repertoire of negotiable resources' consists of English linguistic resources, involving the joint construction of a communicative repertoire instrumental in greatly varying contexts,
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both real and in the minds of interactants. The activity-based concept of community of practice with its diuse alliances and communities of imagination and alignment ts ELF interactions well because ELF participants have heterogeneous backgrounds and diverse social and linguistic expectations. Rather than being characterized by xed social categories and stable identities, ELF users are agentively involved in the construction of event-specic, interactional styles and frameworks. 3. There is a need for radically rethinking the linguistic norm with which ELF speakers' discourse behaviour is to be compared (cf. Seidlhofer 2001). This norm cannot be the monolingual English native speaker, simply because ELF speakers are by denition not monolingual speakers. It has long been recognized that L2 learners, and much less so ELF users, often do not aspire to English native speaker pragmatics as a target. They never intend to become part of any English native speaker community just as immigrants may opt for partial or full divergence from their host country's pragmatic norms as a strategy of L1 identity maintenance. And English native speakers may perceive non-native speakers' total convergence as inappropriately intrusive and inconsistent with the non-native outsider role. The yardstick for measuring ELF speakers' performance should therefore rather be an `expert in ELF use', a stable multilingual speaker under comparable socio-cultural and historical conditions of language use, and with comparable goals for interaction. There is some empirical support for this stance, for example from studies of the pragmatic behaviour of bilinguals. Studies of their requesting behaviour point to an `intercultural style' a third, hybrid way developed, for example, by HebrewEnglish bilinguals (Blum-Kulka 1990), who realize requests dierently in each language, and who also dier signicantly from monolingual speakers' performance but not because of lack of competence. Rather than measuring ELF talk against an English L1 norm, one might openly regard ELF as a hybrid language hybrid in the sense of Latin hibrida as anything derived from heterogeneous sources. In literary and cultural studies, the notion of `hybridity' has long assumed importance, for instance in the writing of Bhabha (1994), who sees hybridity as border-crossing, taking alien items into one's native language and culture, going against conventional rules and standards. Also, the work of Bakhtin (1981) links hybridity to narrative construction and dialogicity, and regards it as a procedure to create multiphone texts made up of multiple voices showing `inner dialogicity' despite being overtly realized in one language. These ideas are useful for conceptualising ELF. Here I would further dierentiate between phenotypical hybridity, where the foreign admixture is manifest on the surface (transfer is isolable), and genotypical hybridity, where dierent mental lexica or, in a Whoran way, dierent underlying `Weltanschauungen' and conceptual sets, may be operative in ELF speakers. While the conventional perspective on L2 speakers is characterized by
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disregarding their possession of other languages and subjecting them to L2, perspectives on hybrid procedures aim at making or leaving recognizable those other languages in ELF, thus celebrating the `otherness' under the surface of the English language. This positive view of `the otherness' in ELF is of course reected in strong countercurrents of resistance and a new pride in national, regional and local languages and language varieties. (See above, page 562, and cf. Canagarajah's 1999 plea for `appropriating discourses', for resisting and subverting English norms such that a `pluralized English' can accommodate ELF speakers' needs, norms and values, and see also Singh, Kell and Pandian 2002.) 5. CONCLUSION In conceptualising and researching ELF, we need `a third way', which steers clear of the extremes of ghting the spread of English for its linguistic imperialism, and accepting it in toto for its benets. Accepting hybridity and using English creatively for one's own communicative purposes seems to be one such `third way'. This was amply documented in the study of actual ELF talk described above. Such a compromise `third way' for ELF had already been suggested by Fishman 25 years ago when he called ELF an `additional language' (1977: 329.), a `co-language' functioning not against, but in conjunction with, local languages. The results of our project on the inuence of English on discourse norms of other languages described above, show that the massive borrowing from English lexis is not matched with (more insidious) shifts in discourse conventions. And nally, the project on the introduction of English as a medium of instruction in German universities has shown that in tertiary education one of Fishman's (1996) seven parameters of `Anglication' there are no signs (yet) of a threat to a native language (German) and to multilingualism. Using English initially as an auxiliary language from which students can be weaned once the national language is mastered, has proved to be a popular model for ELF in tertiary education in Germany. Rather than pre-determine research and emotionalise discussion through such passe-partout derogative terms as (neo)imperialism and (neo)colonialism, and to disqualify all arguments which do not t the mainstream ideological stance of seeing English as a threat to multilingualism as politically nave, I nd it better to try to do more (and more varied) empirical research on how ELF is actually used and what it does to local languages. To facilitate research we need both larger corpora (cf. Seidhofer's 2001 VOICE initiative) and a `conceptual basis'. I have suggested three areas where such a conceptualization might begin: language acquisition, reference group, and linguistic norm; I have pleaded for adopting a social (macro) view of ELF learning, adopting the concept of community of practice, and taking hybridity as a linguistic-cultural norm. To date, surprisingly little work has been done in the areas covered by the projects described above: actual ELF talk; the eect massive global translation and multilingual text production is having on local languages; and the use of ELF in European
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educational contexts. Much needs to be done, if research is not to lag further behind the reality of the global use of English as a language for communication. With reference to my limited work alone, it would seem that English as a lingua franca is not, for the present time, a threat to multilingualism.

NOTES
1. cf. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) and their explanation of phenomena such as openness to forms from other languages. In `diuse' linguistic situations such as the typical ELF interaction, language mixing tends to occur more regularly and is generally more readily tolerated. 2. In fact the notion of a `speech community' is singularly inappropriate for a conceptualisation of ELF. See the discussion below, for instance on pages 561 and 570. 3. The epithet `instrumental' is, of course, reminiscent of Gardner and Lambert's (1972) classic work on motivation to learn an L2 and their claim that an individual's attitude towards the L2 and the L2 community strongly inuence his/her learning behaviour. An `instrumental orientation' (as the utilitarian counterpart to an `integrative orientation') pertains to the potential gains of being able to communicate in an L2. I can see some conceptual anity here to a language for communication, but apart from the fact that the instrumental integrative dichotomy has since been heavily criticised ELF pertains to language use, not language learning, and this use is not geared to a xed native speaker community as the Gardner/Lambert concept implies. 4. ELF, I would hypothesize, has no `identity formatting potential' (Coupland 2001) other than the L1s (or even other national L2s) of its speakers. These languages and dialects, but not ELF, are important denominators of identities (cf. Bell 2001 for a discussion of language as identity marker). With respect to Bell's (2001) two complementary and co-existent dimensions of style, referee-design and audience design, I would hypothesize that in ELF talk, referee-design is typically `realised' in relation to speakers' own ingroup, but not to any anglophone referee group. 5. This is not the place to provide details about the translation theory in which these concepts were developed. I refer the reader to House (1977, 1997) where a functional-pragmatic theory of translation including the concept of a `cultural lter' is explicated, and where this lter is given substance through the results of a body of contrastive EnglishGerman work in the form of a set of continua along which German and English text producers' communicative preferences tend to vary (cf., e.g. House 1996a). 6. The project initially investigates the inuence ELF has on German (later French and Spanish) texts. Ongoing PhD work by associated project workers is also widening this focus to Korean, Portuguese and Chinese texts. 7. A detailed description of the project and more comprehensive data analysis is given in House (2002b). 8. All names are anonymised. 9. Transcription conventions in the data displayed are as follows: [overlap] overlap indicated by square brackets (seconds) length of pauses given in round brackets (non-verbal behaviour) non-verbal behaviour also in round brackets @@@ laughter
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10. `Misunderstanding' is a complex phenomenon, and there are many dierent and possibly interacting reasons why misunderstandings occur. Various `types' or levels of such `problematic talk' have been suggested (cf. Coupland, Giles and Wiemann 1991; House, Kasper and Ross 2003). In talking about misunderstandings in the context of this paper, I refer (quite generally) to inappropriate comprehension manifest on the linguistic surface through, for example, requests for clarication or non-sequitur turn sequences. 11. cf. also Ricento (2000) and his plea for a conceptual framework linking the roles of (agentively involved) individuals and collectivities in the process of language use, attitudes and policies.

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Address correspondence to: Juliane House Institut fuer Allgemeine und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft Hamburg University Von-Melle-Park 6 20146 Hamburg Germany jhouse@uni-hamburg.de
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