Summary: English As A Lingua Franca: A Threat To Multilingualism?

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• 1 What is lingua franca? Definitions and state of the art in lingua franca research

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• What is lingua franca?

  An intermediary language used by speakers of Arabic with travellers form Western Europe - a language of commerce, a rather stable variety with little room for individual variation.

• How does ELF differ from native English?

  ELF is neither a language for specific purposes nor a pidgin, because it is not a restricted code, but a language showing full linguistic and functional range 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.

• What are the most important ingredients of a lingua franca?

  • negotiability
  • variability in terms of speaker proficiency
  • openness to an integration of forms of other languages
    

• What is the interactional approach on ELF discourse?

  There is a focus on how meaning is negotiated with the help of those unstable and varying resources available to ELF interactions. It is concerned with social rather than individual psychological phenomena, and it focuses on language use.

• What does ELF appear to be?

  One of a repertoire of different communicative instruments an individual has at his/her disposal, a useful and versatile tool, a language for communication.

• 2 Languages for communication versus languages for identification: some socio-political considerations

• What are the main determinants of identity?

  Local languages, and particularly an individual's L1(s)

• What is the diglossia situation now developing in Europe?

  English for various pockets of expertise and non-private communication on the one hand, and national and local varieties for affective, identificatory purposes on the other hand.

• Why is the EU's supposedly humane multilingualism but an illusion?

  1. the EU recognizes one and only one official language for every member state
  2. some language in the EU are more equal than others
     

• 3 Some relevant research findings

• 3.1 The project 'Covert translation'

• What is covert translation?

  In 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 filter with which culture-specific textual norms in the source language community are adapted to conventional norms in the receiving language community.

• What is genre mixing?

  Using mechanisms which readers know from journalism, advertising, sermons and other persuasively oriented genres.