World Englishes and English as a lingua franca: Implications of the spread of English

Explores World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca, their spread, varieties, and implications for global communication.

Key Takeaways

English varieties worldwide reflect historical, social, and cultural influences.
ELF highlights the adaptive, negotiated nature of English communication globally.
More English use occurs among non-native speakers than native speakers.
Language norms in ELF are flexible and context-dependent rather than fixed.
Understanding World Englishes and ELF is crucial for language teaching, testing, and policy.

What the video covers

English has spread globally over the past 300 years, initially driven by British colonial expansion.
Braj Kachru's three concentric circles model categorizes English use into inner, outer, and expanding circles.
World Englishes show unique lexical, grammatical, and phonological features influenced by local languages and cultures.
Examples include Australian English lexical abbreviations, Sri Lankan English syntax ellipsis, and vowel distinctions in Hong Kong English.
Outer circle varieties are increasingly codified and legitimized; expanding circle varieties are also emerging.
Post-modern globalization has led to hybrid, fluid language use across traditional circle boundaries.
English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) refers to English communication between speakers with different first languages.
ELF is important as more daily English conversations occur between non-native speakers than native speakers.
ELF communication is context-bound and dynamic, with speakers creating norms in interaction.
Research into World Englishes and ELF informs understanding of language contact, communication, and language policy.

Chapters

What is Braj Kachru's three circles model?

Kachru's model divides English use worldwide into three circles: the inner circle where English is the dominant native language, the outer circle where English is a second language with localized norms, and the expanding circle where English is learned as a foreign language.

Why is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) important?

ELF is important because it reflects how English is used as a common language between speakers of different first languages, with more daily conversations occurring among non-native speakers than native speakers, highlighting its global communicative role.

How do World Englishes differ from each other?

World Englishes differ in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation due to contact with local languages and cultures, resulting in unique features such as Australian English abbreviations, Sri Lankan English syntax ellipsis, and vowel distinctions in Hong Kong English.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Hello everyone, and welcome to the fourth variation in Language Talk organized through the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. My name is Lou Cardin, and I'm going to be talking to you today about World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca: Implications of the Spread of English. If you have any questions about the talk, please post them in the Q&A chat, and I will answer them at the end of the session. Okay, so it should be fairly well understood that over the past 300 years at least, English has spread across the world, and it is continuing to spread and change. This initial spread was driven, according to Schneider, by the expansion of the British Empire across the globe

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and the resulting colonization of parts of North America, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. As English spread to these parts of the world, it came into contact with a range of indigenous languages. An interaction between these languages led to new varieties of English.

Speaker A

The range of varieties that emerge from this spread have come to be known as World Englishes. Now, we can conceptualize this spread in different ways, but one influential model of World Englishes is Braj Kachru's three concentric circles. So, in this model, which is shown on the

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slide here, there's thought to be an inner circle, an outer circle, and an expanding circle of English. So, the inner circle includes countries like the USA, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. These are the countries where English

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functions as the dominant language. Then there's the outer circle, which includes countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Ghana, Singapore, and Bangladesh. These are typically countries that were previously colonized by Britain or later by the USA, such as the

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Philippines. In these countries, English is used by some but not all of the population, and it may be a first language for some and a second language for many. At the time when Kachru was writing in the 1980s and 90s,

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it was thought that many of the countries in the outer circle had developed or were in the process of developing localized norms of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. And finally, there's the expanding circle, and in these countries—China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, most European

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countries, among many others—English is typically learned as a foreign language in school. Speakers in these countries will often use English for a range of instrumental purposes like international business, consuming English language media, diplomatic communication, and so on.

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Now, I should mention that Kachru's model has been criticized for different reasons, and various other models of World Englishes have been proposed, but it's a useful model in many ways, I think, because it helps us to conceptualize how different

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contexts for English use map onto the historical patterns of the spread of English, either through colonialism or later through trade. Now, World Englishes can be fascinating to study because different varieties, the different Englishes, each demonstrate their own unique characteristics. This variation

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can be observed at the level of lexis, which is vocabulary, or the level of grammar or phonology—that is, accent and pronunciation. So, take Australian English, for example. A characteristic lexical feature in this variety of English, which I happen to speak, is the addition of an "o"

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to an abbreviated word. So, in Australian English, particularly in the spoken register, we might hear the words journo, avo, muso, ambo. Do you know what these words mean? Some are more obvious than others. So, a journo would be a journalist, arvo

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would be afternoon, a muso would be a musician, and ambo an ambulance driver or what's sometimes called a paramedic. If we want to look at syntax, on the other hand, we might consider a feature in Sri Lankan English

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such as ellipsis. So, research has shown that in Sri Lankan English, there might be ellipsis of certain words that would ordinarily be expected. So, in this example from a male speaker, you can see on the slide here: "They hardly know that there's a

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community called Eurasians. Most of them have migrated just a handful here." So, there is "he's" elided, or where dressing is concerned. Also, "no place at all." Now, there is again "he's" elided. And then we might consider phonology, and

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studies like Hung's study on the phonological features of Hong Kong English show us that in Hong Kong English, there's minimal distinction between long and short vowels. So, in Received Pronunciation, which is often a sort of point of comparison,

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for better or worse, we might hear differences between "heat" and "hit," but in Hong Kong English, these vowels might both be realized as "it." So, we might hear "hit" and "hit" as very similar. So, this leads to a smaller

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vowel inventory in Hong Kong English overall compared to Received Pronunciation and some other varieties. I mentioned earlier that outer circle varieties are increasingly being indigenized and legitimized through codification,

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so that's the creation of dictionaries and the acceptance for use in educational settings and so on. We're also more recently starting to see a similar pattern in the expanding circle. So, we might hear now about characteristics or features of China English or Korean English. But we're also in an era of post-modern

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globalization, according to Hall, and this post-modern globalization is characterized by, according to Kanagaraja, things like multilateral interaction between communities, porous national boundaries and languages, communities and cultures that have become hybrid. And this is the result of greater mobility

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across the world and essentially a lot more movement between all of these different circles that were in the model we saw earlier. And these conditions have given rise to new complexities of language use, and one paradigm which tries to

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make sense of these complexities is English as a Lingua Franca. So, what is English as a Lingua Franca? Well, English as a Lingua Franca is defined as communication in English between speakers with different first languages. So, this accounts for lots of different

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communicative situations. So, it could be, for example, a speaker in Japan speaking to someone in Germany through the medium of English, or it could be an Australian English speaker speaking with an Indian English speaker. It could be—there's a whole range of

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different combinations. But English as a Lingua Franca essentially tries to take account of all of these different uses of English among speakers with different lingua-cultural backgrounds. Why is English as a Lingua Franca, or ELF as I'll start to call it

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from here on, why is ELF an important concept? Well, English is now estimated to be spoken by about 25% of the world's population to some degree of proficiency, and moreover, more ELF conversations are estimated to take place

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daily than do conversations between native speakers, the inner circle—speakers of inner circle Englishes. So, English is really being used extensively across the world by L2 or second language speakers. Now, early studies attempted to describe the regular features of ELF. So, early

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studies into ELF tried to treat it essentially as another kind of World English variety, and there were studies into phonology, lexicogrammar, and pragmatics trying to capture what is common across all these different ELF contexts. But this proved to be very difficult, and

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in fact, the current focus in ELF research has shifted to understanding what makes communication successful in contexts which are characterized as being fluid and dynamic. So, the idea here is that the main characteristic of an ELF encounter is that it's highly

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unpredictable and highly context-bound. So, the speakers kind of make up their own rules and norms in the context in which they find themselves communicating. Now, this is expressed by Kanagaraja here as saying ELF is inter-subjectively constructed in each specific context of interaction,

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negotiated by each set of speakers for their purposes. Now, with this view of ELF, the research into its characteristics has then attempted to understand what are the k

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unpredictable and highly context bound so the speakers kind of make up their own rules and norms in the context in which they find themselves communicating now this is expressed by kanagaraja here as saying elf is inter-subjectively constructed in each specific context of interaction

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negotiated by each set of speakers for their purposes now with this view of elf the research into its characteristics have then attempted to understand what are the key elements of elf communication that allows for this kind of successful

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communicative outcomes and these are the key themes i guess that come out of that kind of research one is accommodation now accommodation is the process of making yourself intelligible to an interlocutor so your speaking partner and also adjusting to your speaking

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partners speech style their accent their way of communicating and accommodation is absolutely central in health communication also central are the use of strategies to preempt or negotiate misunderstanding so things like clarification self-repair repetition paraphrasing these are all extremely

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useful for being an effective communicator in an elf setting and then there's maintaining a smooth and collaborative interaction so things like turn taking knowing when to speak when to interrupt how to interrupt and also using appropriate politeness strategies

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which are appropriate for that particular context in which you find yourself communicating so these are the key elements of health communication that have really come out of the research literature now we can stop there and just think for

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a minute what are some of the implications of this really interesting canon of research into world englishes and english as a lingua franca well this research provides insights into the processes of language contact so what happens when languages come into contact

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we've learned a lot about that through world english's research in particular language change how can we understand this sort of historical development of new english varieties and there's been some really interesting work that shows that there are some

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fairly uniform steps actually that english language new english varieties take as they become more sort of legitimized and then there's the very interesting and challenging issue of linguistic imperialism is the spread of english a good thing or a bad thing and i think

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there's probably a lot of scholars who would suggest that it's a mixture of both um in in different ways and there's a lot of interesting research on linguistic imperialism but i want to turn to one particular implication for world englishes and english as a

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lingua franca and that is the implication for language education so the teaching or assessment of english and specifically i want to turn to the challenge that world englishes and english as a lingua franca presents for those who assess the language

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proficiency of l2 users so people who are using english as a second language and this is the area which we will call language testing let me just say a little bit about language testing so you might imagine a language test is

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a fairly innocuous sort of thing like the french oral test that you need to prepare for a gcse or maybe the german grammar test you need to sit at the end of each term but actually language tests come in all

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shapes and sizes and they're used for a variety of purposes around the world we can put them on a continuum from lower stakes to higher stakes so low stakes language tests are things like classroom assessments where your teacher

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just wants to see how you're going or diagnostic tests or app-based learning quizzes like a quiz in duolingo these kinds of assessments have no real impact on your life they're just fun or they might give you some useful

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information we then get into sort of medium stakes tests like the kind of achievement tests you might take at the end of a term or at the end of a school year where it is quite important but perhaps

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it's not going to change or alter your life in a dramatic way depending on what happens in that language test but then we get into the higher stakes tests um and language testing is used for a lot of high stakes decisions

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including university admissions so who's allowed to come to university whether they're deemed to have a sufficient level of language proficiency also professional certification and licensing such as who can get a job as a doctor or a nurse again depending on their level of

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language proficiency and then the very controversial area of language testing for immigration and citizenship which has had a lot of research and really a quite a an ethical kind of minefield now what are the challenges that world englishes and english as a

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lingua franca specifically bring to this whole process of language testing well the first one we'll call the world english's challenge and this is really the idea that the native speaker inner circle norm should not should no longer be

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considered the standard in language assessments so the idea the logic here is that we know from world englishes that there's many varieties of english many ways of being correct and this of course means that tests measuring formal correctness in areas

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like grammar vocabulary pronunciation will often be really limited if they try and assess against a sort of idealized standard variety however you might define that let's have a look at an example so this is a test item which comes from a language test called

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the toeic test which is taken you know every year by many many thousands of people and um i should mention this item is probably quite old now but you can see in this test item it's a grammar item and the candidate would be asked

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which part of this sentence has an error a grammatical error so which of the three underlined bits in this sentence has a grammatical error now i've given you a few seconds to think about this and you probably came up with this equipments

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because it's a pluralization of an uncountable noun but actually we know from the research literature into world englishes and english as a lingua franca the pluralization of uncountable nouns is actually incredibly common across different varieties and different elf settings and it's so

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common in fact that if we do a search in a search engine like google scholar where we can look at published academic papers uh for a phrase like new equipments we can see over 6 000 results for this particular

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phrase so we can see here a clear example of how kind of language tests which are very focused on a standard grammar can in fact be quite limited and and potentially even lead to wrong decisions about someone's language proficiency

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a second kind of challenge comes more from the elf paradigm and this is the idea that language tests are wrongly focused on judging against a stable variety at all um and this is nicely summed up i think in this quote from

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kanagaraja where he says in a context where we have to constantly shuttle between different varieties and communities proficiency becomes complex one needs the capacity to negotiate diverse varieties to facilitate communication the passive competence to understand new varieties now what does this mean in practice well

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it probably means that if we want to develop a language test or assessment guided by the principles of english as a lingua franca we have to come back to this slide which i showed you earlier where the key

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elements of elf communication of accommodation um negotiating and preempting misunderstanding and maintaining smooth interaction these come to the fore and we actually put issues like correct grammar uh you know accurate use of of lexus or sophisticated use of

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vocabulary these kinds of issues we put those to the background so the strategic elements of communication are really what we're interested in there now you might be thinking at this point um well why should second language users have to

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carry the burden for communication in alpha interaction so if we're talking about language tests that typically second language users have to take isn't there an assumption here that it's the first language users the inner circle users of english

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are somehow naturally the best communicators in an elf environment now that leads to another logical question do we also need to consider the elf proficiency of l1 users of english in specific domains of communication now this is a very valid question and to

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explore it further i want to consider the context of aviation english now english is the official language of international aviation you may know this already um pilots and air traffic personnel all over the world who want to operate

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in international flights must learn a restricted code which is called standardized radio telephony phraseology now you might have seen this kind of phraseology you might be familiar with it from films or tv and you can see an example here on the slide

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faster faster 345 cleared straight in ils approach runway 28 etc this is a very established and rigid code for communication in this domain and pilots and air traffic controllers learn radio telephony physiology as a part of their normal training

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but pilots and air traffic personnel also need to be able to demonstrate proficiency in what's called plain language that is a sort of more general type of english language proficiency and this is for use in what are called

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non-routine situations so it's likely that if something terrible happens um a big kind of safety issue there might not be a phraseology phrase that will capture what's happening and so pilots and air traffic controllers need to be able to

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operate in english in these non-routine situations now for that reason plain language is assessed through english language tests and iko which is the international civil aviation organization which oversees all of this policy says when plain language is required it

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should be delivered in the same clear concise and unambiguous manner as standardized phraseology okay so the idea is that plain language needs to be you know effective efficient and so on but under this policy l1 users so the inner

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circle native speakers are often considered probable expert users and what that means is that they are sort of automatically exempted from the full assessment regime now this could lead to problems i want to play you an audio now this is an authentic

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recording of communication between an etihad pilot and an air traffic controller at jfk airport in new york and this broadcast was captured um and it's actually available in a youtube channel and i recommend that you go to this youtube

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channel and take a look it's very interesting video but i'm just going to play the audio and show you a transcript and as you listen i want you to see if you can pinpoint the source of the miscommunication

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i hope this works because we're going to play audio over this platform echo in the echo tango 503 what do you part gravel 28 what taxiway the letter oh negative sir we're on two two right holding charter boxer what tax rate do

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you enter the ramp okay so we just exit the runway and we're holding short of foxtrot on to the right you're not listening to what i'm asking you what types where do you enter the ramp i'm not on the ramp yet sir what kind of

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suite do you enter the ramp tell me what letter okay it continues okay we can enter at uh kilo for str5c3 that's what i need to get out of you we talked like six times straight ahead in more shuttle hotels

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sir straight ahead of hotel right and then a little bit of time passes and it escalates etd 503 follow asian at golf or short of juliet on the runway uh yes sir we follow the asiana and next time i would like you to be polite with

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me thank you okay but if i gotta talk to you six times and i got all the people i gotta talk to and you don't understand what i'm saying what i'm saying collide with me all right are you one flight with me i'll make a

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report go ahead okay so that was obviously a particularly problematic exchange between the pilot and the air traffic controller i wondered i know it came very fast but i wonder if you picked up what might have been the problem here if you notice

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the air traffic controller who's jfk gnd here essentially asked the same question multiple times where do you park what taxiway do you enter the ramp what taxiway do you enter the ramp what taxiway do you enter the ramp

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so just sort of hammering home the same question even though it's clear that there's a misunderstanding of foot now etihad 503's response you can see in the green on this slide i'm not on the ramp yet sir seems to suggest that etihad 503 was

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confused because the question was being posed in a present tense so what taxiway do you enter the ramp that he had saying but i'm not on the ramp and actually the question was talking about a future event now this is kind of confirmed not

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confirmed but i guess backed up this interpretation if we look i mentioned that this is on a youtube video if we look at some of the comments on this youtube video and actually these videos are very interesting because

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other pilots and air traffic controllers go on and add comments to these radio telephony exchanges so this first comment says american controllers are the only ones that for a strange reason don't respect standard iko phraseology but speak like

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they do to their neighbors or on the street like my etihad colleague i would not understand such a question using present tense when i'm taxing on a taxiway to request that will be my future taxiway is hard to understand

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plus when a foreigner can't understand what you say does not mean he's deaf so it's useless to repeat the same sentence over and over and then another comment below which is a bit more acerbic about well this wouldn't happen in

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europe now i'm going to um leave it there because where we have to finish but um what i hope i've demonstrated here is that world englishes and english as a lingua franca raise lots of interesting and challenging questions

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about english language proficiency in a globalized world questions like what it is how to measure it and who should have to demonstrate this kind of elf proficiency so i would pose some questions to you if you've been listening all this time

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do you think health proficiency is more important than having accurate grammar and pronunciation and in what settings might this be the case and also do you think you would be able to communicate well in elf contexts why why not and how could we

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increase that kind of capability thank you very much for listening and i'm

Topics:World EnglishesEnglish as a Lingua FrancaBraj Kachrulanguage spreadEnglish varietieslanguage contactglobal Englishlinguisticslanguage policylanguage teaching

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