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English As a Lingua Franca in Europe: How Is Cultural Diversity Expressed in the Common Tongue?

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English As a Lingua Franca in Europe: How Is Cultural Diversity Expressed in the Common Tongue? Master of Arts Thesis Euroculture University of Groningen Uppsala University June 2014 English as a Lingua Franca in Europe: How is Cultural Diversity Expressed in the Common Tongue? Submitted by: Mathieu Munsch Student number home university: S2395002 email: [email protected] Supervised by: Name of supervisor home university: Charlotte Gooskens Name of supervisor host university: Jérôme-Frédéric Josserand Groningen, June 1st, 2014 MA Programme Euroculture Declaration I, Mathieu Munsch hereby declare that this thesis, entitled “English as a Lingua Franca in Europe: How is Cultural Diversity Expressed in the Common Tongue?”, submitted as partial requirement for the MA Program Euroculture, is my own original work and expressed in my own words. Any use made within this text of works of other authors in any form (e.g. ideas, figures, texts, tables, etc.) are properly acknowledged in the text as well as in the bibliography. I hereby also acknowledge that I was informed about the regulations pertaining to the assessment of the MA thesis Euroculture and about the general completion rules for the Master of Arts Programme Euroculture. Signed Date June 1st, 2014 Table of contents Introduction.................................................................................................1 I) Literature Review....................................................................................3 1) Language ideologies...............................................................................................3 a) Standard-language ideology................................................................................3 b) World Englishes..................................................................................................5 c) English as a lingua franca...................................................................................7 2) Theorizing English as a lingua franca.................................................................9 a) Language for identification VS. language for communication...........................9 b) Attitudes towards English as a lingua franca....................................................10 c) English as a lingua franca and identity..............................................................11 3) Language and culture..........................................................................................12 a) Linguistic relativity..........................................................................................12 b) Languaculture...................................................................................................13 c) Discourse community.......................................................................................14 4) Examples of previously conducted studies on ELF..........................................15 II) Methodology.........................................................................................17 1) VOICE – Description of the corpus...................................................................17 2) An empirical analysis of VOICE........................................................................19 III) Analysis................................................................................................22 1) Influence of English standards and native languaculture on ELF.................22 a) Standards of English.........................................................................................22 b) English native culture.......................................................................................24 2) Influence of non-English languaculture on ELF..............................................29 a) Personal linguistic and cultural background.....................................................29 b) Cultural space of interaction.............................................................................34 3) Influence of the process of communication on ELF.........................................38 a) Re-appropriation of standards...........................................................................38 b) ELF speech community....................................................................................44 Limitations.................................................................................................48 Conclusions................................................................................................50 Bibliography...............................................................................................53 Appendices.................................................................................................56 Introduction There are many factors that account for the spread of English worldwide and its establishment as an international language—from the British colonial history to the economic hegemony of the United States in the 20th century.1 The fact is that the history of the English language is just one story within the context of globalization. As nations become more and more integrated with one-another and as technology allows people to move and communicate across the globe at previously unimaginable speeds via the use of the Internet or air travel, the need for a common language that would allow people to communicate with each other regardless of their diverse cultural backgrounds is starting to be felt. Despite the efforts of linguists such as Zamenhof to provide the world with a language for international communication devoid of native speakers such as Esperanto, those never rose to the position of global lingua franca. If any language may pretend to such a status today, it would have to be English.2 The rise of a global lingua franca such as English, although it undeniably provides huge advantages to a large number of people, is also prone to a great deal of criticism. Indeed, such a phenomenon is often understood as responsible for the death of multiple languages worldwide and is often feared to induce a process of Anglo- Americanization, especially in the context of Europe, where the European Union upholds a strict language policy rooted in the inherent value of language diversity, where the national paradigm still dominates the language classroom3, and where national institutions such as the Académie française for France4 or the Stichting Taalverdediging for the Netherlands5 actively work, among other things, to protect their national language from the corrupting effect that they believe English could have on them. 1 David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Engligh Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 106. 2 Hongyan Wang, “English as a Lingua Franca: Mutual Intelligibility of Chinese, Dutch and American Speakers of English,” Doctoral thesis, (Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT), 2007), 2. 3 Karen Risager, Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm, Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education, (Clevedon; Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2007), 142. 4 Académie Française, “Les Missions,” accessed May 18, 2014, http://www.academie- francaise.fr/linstitution/les-missions 5 Stichting Taalverdediging, accessed May 18, 2014, http://www.taalverdediging.nl/ 1 Using the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE)6, a collection of naturally occurring spoken interactions in English, this paper seeks to refine the field of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by identifying the cultural factors that are involved in the production of one's speech in ELF situations. Close attention will be paid to the communicative strategies that the participants use, to the way their identities are expressed in their speech, to instances of code-switching or to neologisms that they may use, and to the ways in which they accommodate each other whenever communication is not clear. The aim of this thesis is threefold: Firstly, the claim of Englishization – or of Anglo-Americanization – of Europe will be investigated from a sociolinguistic perspective. Is the spread of English really inducing an impoverishment of the continent's cultural landscape by imposing its native speakers' values and cultural references to the millions of Europeans that have adopted it as a tool for communication? In this respect, the question of the link between language and culture will have to be examined in the context of English as spoken by non-native speakers. Secondly, the extent to which a plurality of cultures can be re-expressed through the means of English will be looked into by attempting to answer the following question: How is the English language changing as it spreads to new settings and is re- appropriated by new speakers across Europe? Thirdly, by taking the diversity of cultures of ELF speakers into account, this thesis will look into the different strategies that are used to ensure successful communication. Thus, the following question will be asked: What are the different tools that English speakers need in order to express themselves and understand others in an intercultural environment? In order to answer these three questions, the argument of this paper will be structured as follow. The first chapter will provide the theoretical background on which this study will be based. The second chapter will explain the methodology that will then be used in the third chapter—the analysis itself. In the fourth chapter, some of the limitations of this thesis will be highlighted in order to provide some suggestions on the type of research that should be conducted next. Finally, this thesis will conclude
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