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Оглавление2. Mid-Atlantic English
2.1 Definition
In today’s educational establishments, it seems sociolinguistically axiomatic that EFL students no longer keep the two varieties separate in their English. This linguistic convergence of BrE and AmE is labelled by some scholars as Mid-Atlantic English (cf. Melchers & Shaw, 2003, p. 186; Modiano, 2009, p. 61). As a result, ‘MAE’ describes a version of the English language that is neither predominantly AmE nor BrE in usage regarding pronunciation, lexis, lexico-grammar, and spelling. Modiano states that ‘MAE’ usage is inevitable among the ELT community and ought to be regarded as something positive. In actual fact, this hybrid form of BrE and AmE fosters cultural pluralism. Mastering ‘MAE’ “presupposes an implementation of it as a communicative strategy, as well as an understanding of the differences between BrE and AmE” (Modiano, 1998, p. 245).
Originally, the label ‘Mid-Atlantic’ referred to a kind of accent associated with a pronunciation of English that was formerly cultivated by American actresses and actors for use in theatre, especially in productions of Shakespeare, in films and by news announcers in the USA. It was also carefully taught at some American boarding schools. Consequently, it is not a vernacular accent, connected with any given American community, but is best described as a sociolect, associated with the American upper class.
This ‘MAE’ accent, equally dubbed ‘Transatlantic’ accent, used to be very popular from the 1920s/1930s to the end of World War II (MacNeil & Cran, 2005, p. 51). Yet, its overall usage was clearly beginning to wane following World War Two. The British expatriate Angela Lansbury, for example, who moved to New York in 1940 and is well known for having played the part of a bestselling crime author and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher in the television series Murder, She Wrote, exemplified this ‘MAE’ accent.
Still, this empirical project embraces the linguistic concept that is based on Modiano’s definition of ‘MAE’: “Recent findings suggest, however, that an increasing number of native speakers are mixing features of AmE and BrE, and furthermore, many, if not most second language speakers in Europe and elsewhere have begun to speak a mixture, sometimes called Mid-Atlantic English” (Modiano, 1996a, p. 5).
The following briefly outlines some scholars’ vision of ‘MAE’ as a linguistic concept.
Görlach and Schröder stated that the concept of ‘MAE’ is an insufficient ‘variety’ of English: “an odd mixture of speech levels and…an artificial jargon, which is acceptable neither to the educated Briton nor to the educated American” (1985, p. 230). Axelsson (as cited in Modiano, 2002, p. 133) argues in a less critical manner by claiming that “Mid-Atlantic English, at least in the sense Modiano uses it in his 1993 article, is still a utopian variety of English not yet established in Sweden, even if the general development seems to be slowly moving in that direction”. Her position is based on her study of Swedish university students’ pronunciation patterns. It brought to light that 70 % of the students mixed features of BrE and AmE, as the recordings revealed (Modiano, 2002, p. 144). Furthermore, she dismisses the label of ‘Mid-Atlantic English’ on the grounds that ‘mid’ would suggest equal influence from both major varieties. Another reason she provides against this term is that it would “exclude all varieties used in other parts of the globe than those close to the Atlantic Ocean” (Modiano, 2002, p. 133).
These two stances on the notion of ‘MAE’ contrast with Modiano’s vision of the current role of English. He envisages a “consumer-friendlier” educational system through the removal of BrE from its unique unchallenged position and advocates increased appreciation of the AmE variety of English, which is gaining in importance due to the effects of the ongoing linguistic and cultural process of Americanisation.
The process of Americanisation that learners of English are undergoing will bring about a shift in their English-language usage: they will be mixing BrE and AmE at the four levels of lexis, pronunciation, lexico-grammar and spelling. This convergence of the two main varieties is labelled by Modiano as ‘MAE’. He argues that ‘MAE’ not only entails a mixture of BrE and AmE but most importantly describes a strategy to “benefit the communicative act” (Modiano, 2009, p. 61). He posits that for EFL speakers, English is used for utilitarian purposes to fit in with a cross-cultural context of speakers of diverse L1 backgrounds. Modiano further argues that in the wake of the impact of AmE on EFL speakers, the first stage of this language change will be the ‘MAE’ conceptualisation of English and the second the emergence of Euro-English, used as a second language. As a consequence, he firmly opposes the view that mainland Europeans’ L2 usage of English will perpetuate the status quo of a foreign language (Modiano 2009, 2017).
Melchers, however, provides a definition of ‘MAE’ with the sole focus on its phonological features, although evading the term ‘variety’:
Mid-Atlantic–in its general sense–refers to something which has both British and American characteristics, or is designed to appeal to both the British and the Americans…a term for kinds of English, especially accents, that have features drawn from both North AmE and BrE. (1998, p. 263)
Regarding the influence of AmE on International English1, the homogenisation in terms of lexis, for instance, towards an increasing usage of AmE, was substantiated by Trudgill (as cited in Jenkins, 2003, p. 91), who asserts that “the general trend does seem to be towards increasingly international use of originally American vocabulary items”. As claimed by him, the reason for this lies in people’s high exposure to the media and film industries dominated by the US. This ‘MAE’ usage was corroborated by a Swedish study carried out by Söderberg and Modiano in 2002 (Modiano, 2002, pp. 147–171). It evidenced that Swedish schoolchildren had a clear bias towards AmE lexis. Crystal also subscribes−albeit in a more general sense−to Trudgill’s view by asserting “US English does seem likely to be the most influential in the development of WSSE”2 (Crystal, 2003a, p. 188). Concerning linguistic Americanisation, Engel boldly imagines that “[…] 2120 would be a plausible and arithmetically neat guesstimate−when American English absorbs the British version completely” (Engel, 2017, p. 3).
Against this backdrop, the question arises whether it is pedagogically sound to advise EFL learners against using a mixture of BrE and AmE. The following chapter will therefore discuss the issue of consistency between BrE and AmE in EFL settings.
2.2 The Issue of Consistency
The issue of consistency, i. e. a consistent usage of either BrE or AmE is inextricably linked with the notion of ‘MAE’ (Modiano, 2009, p. 96). It is fair to acknowledge that the increasing influence of AmE on students’ English makes a pure rendition of BrE impossible. The sociolinguistic fact is that not only do learners of English mix features of BrE and AmE, but also a substantial number of native speakers of English (cf. Modiano, 1996a, p. 5), which is why I resolved not only to take three informant groups of NNSs in the EFL context but also UK NSs of English as an important reference group.
Modiano strongly advocates a conscious mix of BrE and AmE by positing that “a good communicator strives to use features of the language which are most easily understood by the interlocutor, and if this means that one mixes features of various varieties, this should be both accepted and encouraged” (Modiano, 2009, p. 96). The scholar also believes that the call for consistency is often just a “disguised form of discrimination” (Modiano, 1998, p. 242).
However, as far as the implications for the EFL educational context are concerned, it may be objected that an erratic mixing of BrE and AmE ought to be discouraged. A mixed usage of BrE and AmE spelling items, for instance, could strike the reader as disturbing and confusing. This also holds true for the lexical area. While EFL learners’ developed ability to adapt to the communicative situation at hand eases communication in global exchanges, at the same time it also demands from them to maintain some degree of consistency to avoid random mixing, which would be counterproductive in terms of communicative expediency.
The following recommendation for EFL teaching could therefore be considered: only mix when indispensably necessary for the purposes of situational adaptation and definitely refrain from using culture-specific lexis.3 A case in point for culturally-induced “lexical specificity” is the BrE term ‘public school’, which may give rise to misunderstandings in international settings. In the UK, this type of school denotes a privately-owned institution. Parents pay for their children’s education there. The AmE equivalent ‘private school’ is understood internationally as fee-paying educational establishments. Conversely, the AmE ‘busboy’ might be confusing to an EFL speaker and linguistically not adapted to international forums. In AmE, it denotes a person who works in a restaurant whose task is to remove dirty dishes and bring clean ones. A ‘waiter’s assistant’ would be the more communicatively expedient term for international settings. Hence, awareness-raising of BrE and AmE contrasts in the four language areas of lexis, pronunciation, lexico-grammar and spelling urgently needs to be placed high on the agenda in terms of innovative teaching and learning protocols. In this manner, EFL learners are better equipped to decide in which sociolinguistic circumstances the variety switching may be an extremely efficient cross-cultural communicative tool. Accordingly, it was also the objective of the present investigation to elicit the surveyed informants’ stance on a consistent use of either BrE or AmE. The demand for consistency was indeed no longer supported by large segments of EFL survey populations in Sweden, for example. They turned out to be keen mixers of the two major forms of English (Modiano, 2002, 2009).
Within the ‘MAE’ paradigm, it is also vital to address another major tenet: situational adaptation. It is closely bound up with the issue of consistency. The following sub-chapter therefore discusses this important notion of situational adaptation.
2.3 Situational Adaptation
Situational adaptation or linguistic accommodation implies the intercultural speaker’s ability to “appraise the situation” in the communicative act (Modiano, 2009, p. 13). In order to facilitate interaction with their interlocutor, it is communicatively more expedient for the intercultural speaker of English to gauge, if possible, their interlocutor’s level of English, educational background and the variety of English they speak. In Modiano’s words, “this linguistic etiquette is in stark contrast to an insensitive speaker who goes forward expecting others to understand what they have to say without making any effort to package their message in a form which is more easily received by others” (2009, pp. 13–14).
One important step of this professed increase of pedagogical flexibility is not to coerce students into an unadulterated BrE rendition. It should be acknowledged that NNSs have now become so influenced by AmE that they are using an amalgam of the two major varieties. The corollary to this changing sociolinguistic profile is that ‘MAE’ deserves its rightful place in the EFL enterprise. The focus should be placed on awareness-raising of BrE/AmE contrasts concomitant with flexible accommodation skills by consciously employing a mix of BrE and AmE suited to the given communicative context. (Modiano, 2009, p. 61, p. 137). The principle of implementing situational adaptation against the backdrop of the ‘MAE’ paradigm is to foster and apply a mega-perspective defined as “a constant process of adaptation to the linguistic challenges of the communicative act at hand” (Modiano, 2009, p. 109). Due to the ubiquity of AmE worldwide, at the lexical level an effective international communicator, for example, is likely not to employ typically BrE culture-specific words such as ‘rubber’, ‘public school’, ‘pudding/sweet’ but would instead rather resort to ‘eraser’, ‘private boarding school’ and ‘dessert’. Sometimes, even words used in either main variety but with radically different meanings would be prone to misunderstanding in international forums, e. g. ‘to table a proposal’. In BrE, this phrase connotes that the proposal is brought up for discussion but in AmE it is ‘postponed’. A speaker with a cross-cultural orientation would avoid such ambiguity and either use ‘to suggest something for discussion’ for the BrE connotation of ‘to table’ or ‘to delay the discussion’ for the AmE connotation.
Another term that needs to be addressed within the ‘MAE’ paradigm is the ‘singularity principle’. It is closely related to the standard language ideology controversy and quite naturally overlaps with the issues of situational adaptation and consistency. This will be the focus of the next sub-chapter.
2.4 The Singularity Principle
Proponents of the singularity principle assert that one language is inherently superior to others. In the context of BrE and AmE, the privileged and predominant variety has to date been BrE in EFL teaching, which acts as the bulwark of correct usage on account of its quasi-incontestable enormous legacy of overt prestige (Modiano, 2002, p. 10). Nonetheless, this view may lack pedagogical credibility to accommodate today’s diverse EFL environments under the impact of linguistic Americanisation, because it cannot be argued that BrE inherently has higher status than AmE or any other variety of English. This posture contradicts a seemingly different sociolinguistic reality: NSs’ and NNSs’ mixing of BrE and AmE.
By dismissing the singularity principle as inappropriate pedagogy in this global era, a mixed version of BrE and AmE can justly be considered as a basic key communicative strategy, particularly utilised in international settings (Modiano, 2009, p. 61). How ‘MAE’ usage manifests itself among EFL students and teachers in Germany and Switzerland will be the objective of this study.
Hence, it becomes apparent that empirical studies of the coexistence of BrE and AmE in EFL settings, viewed from a synchronic and descriptive sociolinguistic frame of reference, can reveal a great deal about the nature and degree of mixing among the EFL constituency. In seeking to identify the assumed role of English, several studies related to the ‘MAE’ paradigm were carried out prior to mine, notably in Sweden. The subsequent chapter will provide a brief critical selection of these, preceded by a short introduction, and finish with some concluding remarks.
2.5 Previous Studies
Introduction
The current position of English as a world language seems to be unassailable. According to Crystal, the world’s linguistic authority on the English language, English is the most widely taught foreign language in the world (2003a, p. 5). Fuelled by the strong Americanisation process worldwide since the end of World War Two, global English has come under the increasing influence of AmE. Hence, NSs’ but especially NNSs’ linguistic behaviour is inevitably affected by this variety. This also holds true for the EFL community.
The BrE variety, the most sought after as a sole educational standard, is now undergoing significant erosion as a result of its de facto coexistence with AmE. This sociolinguistic shift in usage of the English tongue typically results in mixed speech patterns of BrE and AmE and therefore challenges the concept of keeping the two main varieties apart in the EFL classroom (Modiano, 1996a, p. 5; 2009, p. 61). To date, teachers have been “quick to advise their students not to mix variations” of English, in particular BrE and AmE (Modiano, 1993, p. 38). This posture is no longer realistic as AmE is building up tremendous momentum, in such a way that it even encroaches upon EFL learners’ mother tongues and UK English.
Furthermore, the EFL constituency’s’ mixing of BrE and AmE features in the four language areas of lexis, pronunciation, lexico-grammar, and spelling appears to have truly become a natural state of affairs. Their English is increasingly becoming Americanised, emanating from influences such as American-based audio-visual forms of media, for instance television, the Internet, computer games, etc. From a pedagogic and sociolinguistic vantage point, this mixed use of the two strands of English is highly conducive to being employed as a conscious and an effective international communication strategy. In this way, speakers of ‘MAE’ are more optimally geared towards the cross-cultural interlocutor. This communicative strategy hence runs counter to misunderstandings or even communication breakdowns.
Following up on this, the idea of keeping BrE and AmE apart is sociolinguistically and pedagogically unrealistic in EFL education. For this reason, it is crucial to scrutinise the linguistic nature of difference and convergence of BrE and AmE with the help of corpus linguistics and large-scale questionnaire-based studies like the present study. To my knowledge, little empirical effort has hitherto been made to achieve a deeper understanding of the role of BrE and AmE in the German and Swiss EFL context. A serious research gap exists in this regard that urgently needs to be filled. Accordingly, the present quantitative empirical study seeks to monitor not only the informant constituency’s attitudes but also their actual linguistic behaviour with respect to the role of BrE and AmE in EFL teaching.
Several mainly quantitative studies on attitudes, awareness, and usage of the two main reference varieties among EFL students and teachers were carried out in Sweden as well as one in Germany. I selected four of them for this brief critical review. Similar to my own extensive quantitative questionnaire-based survey, notably Swedish scholars and B.A. and M.A. university students investigated the divergence and convergence of AmE and BrE, always coupled with the issue of educational standards and practices for EFL teaching and learning (Modiano, 2002, p. 10).4 Nonetheless, after careful perusal of a large number of research papers investigating the influence of AmE, it emerged that these surveys in the aforementioned countries were either rather small-scale or else limited in terms of the monitored language areas and variables.
The next sub-chapter will provide a brief critical synthesis of selected available research in the specific context of the ‘MAE’ paradigm.
Selected Critical Review
What are pupils’ attitudes to BrE and AmE and what is their linguistic behaviour towards them?
Thörnstrand (2008) conducted a questionnaire-based study with 108 upper secondary students from schools in the Stockholm area. Her one-and-a-half-page long questionnaire addressed lexical, phonological, and orthographic contrasts between BrE and AmE. As to the vocabulary part of the questionnaire, Thörnstrand formed 10 sentences in Swedish. They included lexical items which students were supposed to translate from Swedish into English.
With the aim of exploring whether school students’ pronunciation is affected by AmE, Thörnstrand’s informants were requested to read out a very short text she composed. Each sentence contained words that represented some most common pronunciation differences between BrE and AmE. The main finding of Thörnstrand’s study showed that her informant group of upper secondary students have a tendency to prefer AmE more than BrE in the language areas of lexis and phonology. In her opinion, this is ascribable to exposure to AmE through TV programmes and films. Another finding was that the number of students who mixed both varieties was unexpectedly high, according to her. This stands in stark contrast to the results for the three tested spelling items, which focused on one divergent spelling variable between BrE and AmE ‘-ou/-o’. The survey indeed revealed that more than 60 % of the participating boys and girls opted for the BrE spelling.
Whilst perusing Thörnstrand’s questionnaire-survey, several aspects of it beg critique. The first critique applies to one aspect of her research method: her students had to translate the suggested variables from Swedish into English. I hold the view that this is not a reliable research method. She herself acknowledges in the conclusion that it compromised the validity of the questionnaire because the students had a “smaller vocabulary” than she had imagined (2008, p. 20). With respect to Thörnstrand’s choice of 15 lexical variables, one of them nevertheless elicits critical comment. According to her, ‘taxi’ is BrE and ‘cab’ AmE. Although Americans prefer the term ‘cab’, both are used in the two main varieties (Horlacher & Hough, 1978, p. 32). It might be suspected that ‘cab’, short for ‘taxicab’, used to be an Americanism but became adopted in BrE and is as such not an appropriate variable for a study on ascertaining how AmE lexis influences current NNSs’ English.
Finally, mention should be made of Thörnstrand’s research reliability regarding the monitoring of her survey population’s pronunciation. She concedes that her study solely centred on students’ pronunciation of vowels, in particular the BATH vowel. Other segmental BrE and AmE contrasts, for example, T-voicing and Yod-dropping were not under investigation. Likewise, variations of stress placement between the two main varieties were not considered in her investigation either. Yet, the inclusion of stress patterning in Thörnstrand’s investigation would assuredly have provided a more accurate assessment of differences between BrE and AmE in her informants’ pronunciation.
What is pupils’ degree of lexical and orthographic preference of BrE and AmE and what are their attitudes to the two main varieties?
Söderlund and Modiano conducted a questionnaire-survey in 1999 in a Swedish upper secondary school. As many as 282 students participated and they came from several grades to meet the criterion of representativeness in relation to different levels of proficiency (Modiano, 2002, p. 151). The researchers focused on spelling and vocabulary but included a short attitudinal part in order to find out students’ attitudes to and perceptions of BrE and AmE. They also provided the students’ teachers with a short questionnaire to ask them which variety they prefer and which one they use in their teaching (Modiano, 2002, p. 150). The survey also contained a listening session, which was composed of two parts and conducted before students had to complete the other parts of the questionnaire. In the listening part of the questionnaire, firstly students’ perception of a mixed use of BrE and AmE was targeted. To this end, a short sequence of an MTV video-jockey5, who spoke with a ‘MAE’ accent, was played. Students were asked to answer with “yes” or “no” whether they would like to speak like him, they felt it is easy to understand, and if this ‘MAE’ speech pattern was easier to comprehend than “other English models” (Modiano, 2002, p. 169). Secondly, the researchers’ young informants were supposed to listen to the pronunciation of seven words both in BrE and AmE and had to decide which pronunciation they heard first, and which comes second.
Concerning the global research results, the authors achieved an empirical-based understanding that school students are significantly under the influence of AmE. The authors assert that “there is a tendency to use AmE lexical items as well spelling conventions more often than their BrE alternatives” (Modiano, 2002, p. 167). The findings of the teachers’ questionnaire were also revealing: they claimed that they use BrE in their teaching but their “preferred variety of English was shared between BrE and MAE” (Modiano, 2002, p. 167).
After carefully examining Söderlund’s and Modiano’s quantitative questionnaire-survey, some aspects of their methodology can be challenged. As regards their investigation of the lexical and orthographic area, the suggested translation may not ideally account for research reliability. A more optimal data collection method could consist of the monitored lexical and orthographic items being inserted into a clear textual context. This was my underlying rationale for the questionnaire design. In addition, the researchers’ investigated spelling variables of BrE ‘programme’ and AmE ‘program’ are problematic. As can be seen in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (henceforth abbreviated to CALD), current BrE also employs ‘program’, but in relation to computer programs (CALD, 2013, p. 1224). Furthermore, the spelling items ‘hypnotise’ (BrE) /’hypnotize’ (AmE) might be regarded as being variables with little reliable research potential in terms of spelling variation. Students are probably more familiar with the verb pairs ‘organising’ (BrE) /’organizing’ (AmE), for example.
The authors’ choice of lexical variables equally calls for a few remarks. The putative BrE ‘bathing suit’ and its AmE counterpart ‘swimming suit’ are not likely to offer particularly wise variable choices for empirical scrutiny. ‘Bathing suit’ is old-fashioned in the UK or an AmE lexical item (cf. CALD, 2013, p. 119). The tested BrE ‘Father Christmas’ vs AmE ‘Santa Claus’ word pairs merit some critical comment as well. ‘Santa Claus’ is not a current Americanism, although it was originally a US usage from dialectal Dutch ‘Sante Klaas’, ‘St Nicholas’ (cf. Mencken, 1936, p. 109). It is crucial, in this context, to bear in mind what Tottie posited in respect of the ephemeral nature of Americanisms: “What was an Americanism yesterday may well be perfectly normal British English today, especially in the area of vocabulary…” (Tottie, 2002, p. 3). As to the researchers’ use of terminology, they seem to regard ‘concept’ and ‘variety’ as synonyms for the description of a mixed usage of BrE and AmE. As ‘MAE’ has not undergone the processes of expansion of function, nativisation of linguistic structures and institutionalisation, the tendency of mixing features of BrE and AmE cannot be recognised as having variety status (cf. Mollin, 2006, p. 52). Several empirical studies across Europe would need to be pursued with the aim of vindicating the designation ‘MAE’ variety.
Have Swedish university students adopted BrE or AmE pronunciation? What are their attitudes to it?
Another empirically relevant questionnaire-based study on the coexistence of BrE and AmE was undertaken by Axelsson-Westergren in 2000 (Modiano, 2002, pp. 132–146). Her informants were Swedish first-term university students of English studies from the Uppsala University. Her short study consisted of two parts: research into university students’ pronunciation and “the attitudes to her/his own pronunciation and the type of pronunciation s/he prefers” (2002, p. 133). Her survey participants had to read a short text aloud, which was recorded for purposes of analysis (2002, p. 135). The text contained words with six monitored phonemes that distinguish BrE from AmE. Axelsson-Westergren’s study revealed that 70 % of the surveyed students mixed phonological features from BrE and AmE, although only 36 % had professed to do so in their self-reports (2002, p. 144). Another interesting finding of her study is related to the most influencing factors for the English variety students speak. Eighty per cent of her informant group stated that television and film were the strongest factor that had an impact on their pronunciation, whilst school was only the third strongest. Supported by her statistical results, Axelsson-Westergren in the end draws the inescapable conclusion that a “one-accent approach” is not the best educational standard in Sweden and as a result, claims that EFL practitioners would be advised to acknowledge a combination of the two main varieties. In this way, students will be armed with a good communication strategy for global settings (2002, p. 144). Notwithstanding this sociolinguistically revealing outcome, some of Axelsson-Westergren’s chosen phonological variables are disputable.
First and foremost, the scholar’s choice of variables related to medial-t voicing in AmE vs its voiceless stop variant in BrE will be addressed. To this effect, she decided on the lexical items ‘communicated’ and ‘interchange’. Other variables such as ‘letter’ and ’better’, for example, with which university students are more familiar and which have a higher degree of frequency of use, would probably have offered higher research potential. It is also relevant to question the tested phonological item ‘fault’. The vowel of this noun is usually pronounced in BrE as /ɔː/ and in AmE, both as /ɑː/ and /ɔː/ (Jones, 2011, p. 183; Wells, 2008, p. 300). ‘Thought’, for example, would have been a more appropriate variable to monitor BrE/AmE phonological contrastiveness. Besides, it is important to point out that stress patterns were not accounted for in Axelsson-Westergren’s survey. This would have represented an added value to her research purpose of empirically ascertaining students’ alleged variety-switching between BrE and AmE, which would have consequently built up a more accurate sociolinguistic picture.
What is prospective German EFL Teachers’ actual linguistic behaviour towards BrE and AmE?
Within the framework of a Bachelor thesis, the primary focus of Jungert’s sociolinguistic online survey was on future German EFL teachers’ degree of blending of BrE and AmE features. His research was based on the four language areas of lexis, pronunciation, lexico-grammar, and spelling.
Jungert pursued his research in November 2011 in Germany, at the University of Education, Freiburg. His target group consisted of students of English studies. These students are trained either as primary or secondary school teachers and for this reason will play a key role as a linguistic model for their future school students, whose speech patterns will inevitably be influenced by them. Fifty students participated in Jungert’s study. They were recruited randomly on campus, which is why the questionnaire was short. It was divided into three parts. The first part consisted of 12 sentences with some selected monitored segmental and supra-segmental features pertaining to BrE and AmE. Survey participants had to read them aloud while they were being recorded. The second part was devised in German and asked questions on informants’ personal data, language contact, and the use of English media. The last part was in English and intended to determine university students’ lexical, grammatical, and orthographic use of either BrE or AmE. As for the lexical questionnaire component, it contained a lexical elicitation task with a set of different pictures in which students were required to describe each concept with a single word, to find out if they prefer the BrE or AmE lexical item. Furthermore, the author included four German words to be translated into English, either by the BrE or AmE word, depending on informants’ preference. Two sentences with three monitored variables were given to ascertain whether students employ BrE or AmE lexico-grammatical items.
Concerning Jungert’s pronunciation component of his questionnaire-survey, he could establish that the overall use of BrE and AmE features are, in his words, “absolutely balanced with a 50 % usage each. Thus, from a general point of view, there is no noticeable preference to any of the two varieties” (2011, p. 40). Moreover, Jungert established that the impact of media on students’ English played an important role. Fifty-six per cent of them claim that the media they use are both in BrE and AmE. Jungert also points to the fact that the consumption of AmE media clearly predominates among his informant group.
Jungert’s questionnaire-survey also demonstrated that in the area of lexis, a clear trend towards blending both varieties could be identified, with a marked preference for AmE. As to spelling, mixing occurred as well, but with a tendency towards BrE. Jungert provided a possible explanation for this outcome: the major part of his informant group learnt English in the mid-late 1990s when the educational standard was still mostly under the impact of BrE. It has continued to influence students’ spelling habits to date but they are increasingly also under the impact of AmE. Nevertheless, the investigation into students’ preferred use of lexico-grammatical items displayed a strikingly different picture. The overwhelming majority of the future English teachers opted for the BrE lexico-grammatical item, “almost ignoring the AE possibility” (2011, p. 57). Jungert surmises that this might be due to students usually acquiring lexico-grammar in institutionalised settings with primary focus on BrE.
From his empirical research into the variety status of trainee NNS English teachers, the researcher draws the overall conclusion that there is a considerable tendency towards a ‘MAE’ usage in the language areas of lexis, pronunciation, and spelling. Lexico-grammar, nonetheless, reflected a “stable preference” for BrE (2011, p. 58). In this connection, however, it must be objected that Jungert’s assertion of “stable preference” is only based on three monitored lexico-grammatical variables. A broader array of monitored lexico-grammatical items would have produced more conclusive evidence to determine if EFL university students’ lexico-grammatical usage is truly a matter of “stable preference”. In addition, Jungert’s survey could have afforded more sufficient empirical substantiation by integrating more variables into his survey. It must, of course, be conceded that within the framework of a Bachelor’s thesis the research scope is inevitably rather limited.
Overall, Jungert made a fine contribution to the changing sociolinguistic profile of university students of English studies by proving that their hybrid usage of BrE and AmE held up under closer empirical study within the framework of a Bachelor’s thesis.
2.6 A Novel Perspective in ELT
2.6.1 Paradigm Shift
Previous research has shown that today’s EFL constituency is unavoidably exposed to AmE through the entertainment media, advertisements, fashion, etc. It is a fact that Hollywood retains its dominance over the world market for cultural products like television and films. The European Audiovisual Observatory indicated that the market share of American films in 2000 was even on the rise in fifteen EU countries. Needless to say, the Internet, digital gaming, either online or stand-alone, radio, and print media also prove to be immensely rich in opportunities for the EFL community to have contact with English, often the American version (cf. Berns, 2007, pp. 30–35). This accounts for the sociolinguistic fact that EFL students also get their English input outside the classroom. This extramural English of informal domains was labelled by Preisler as “English from below” (1999, p. 247), which even results in a high motivation for young people to make use of English instead of their mother tongue. Hence, young European learners of English often harbour a genuine desire to foster peer group solidarity, whereby “code-switching to English is an inherent aspect of adolescent speech” (Preisler, 1999, p. 247). The intramural English that Europeans typically acquire in formal settings is called “English from above” by Preisler (1999, p. 247).
The ubiquitous and pluricentric nature of English, one of the approximately 7,000 extant languages in the world, is unquestionably ascribable to two factors, namely “the expansion of British colonial power” and “the emergence of the United States as the leading economic power of the 20th century” (Crystal, 2003b, p. 106). Hence, English fulfils a key function for NNSs. They are afforded the unprecedented opportunity of playing an active part in a dynamic, multilingual, and multi-cultural metropolis by using English as an intra-European lingua franca with cross-cultural communication goals for a vast array of purposes. Nevertheless, mainstream ELT practices are more or less still rooted in rather conservative, well-established foreign-language learning pedagogies aiming at compelling EFL learners to adopt and emulate as the sole variety either BrE in most cases, or AmE, although the latter to a much lesser degree. This quasi-uncontested axiomatic status of BrE supremacy as the educational standard has been seriously challenged in recent years by a changing sociolinguistic profile through linguistic Americanisation with its global reach.
In order to arrive at an improved understanding of today’s sociolinguistic situation within the framework of a hybrid usage of BrE and AmE, it is important to be cognisant of another important sociolinguistic fact: the balance between NSs and NNSs has undergone a significant shift and will surely continue to do so in the future. Crystal maintains that the native to non-native ratio already amounts to at least 1:4 now (Mugglestone, 2006, p. 490). In concrete figures, based on his estimates, he claims that there are currently 320–380 million ENL6 speakers, 300–500 million ESL speakers and between 500 million and 1 billion EFL speakers (Crystal, 2003a, p. 61).
As pointed out above, today’s EFL students assuredly bring a mix of BrE and AmE to the classroom experience. This mix is, on the one hand, to be traced back to intramural English instruction, i. e. in-school, formal learning and on the other to extramural English7, viz. out-of-school, informal learning of English. Both these terms were coined by Sundqvist. Either of them “covers aspects of both input and output” (2009, p. 25). This novel sociolinguistic situation is ascribable to a huge upsurge in linguistic Americanisation because of America’s “size, wealth, industrial might and military strength” (Engel, 2017, p. 5). In the same vein as Sundqvist, it can be posited that this extramural input is by no means non-negligible and is, on the contrary, an indispensable element of “a pedagogy of the authentic”, by which Claire Kramsch (as cited in Modiano, 2009, p. 189) refers to EFL practitioners’ methodological responsibility of being aware of the actual contexts in which EFL learners are making use of English. This actual context is marked by a ‘MAE’ usage, which has the sociolinguistic potential of being more efficient in international encounters.
Modiano views a mixed use of BrE and AmE as the first stage in this incipient language change, which the current research seeks to identify. In his view, it is the stepping stone to the movement towards ‘Euro-English’. He is confident that ‘MAE’, a hybrid form of the two major strands of English, will become the standard for language education in the EU and finally the conceptualisation Euro-English will gain acceptance. Modiano states that “it has become apparent that English is fast becoming a basis for the establishment of a common European social and cultural order,” so “the English of mainland Europe should go through processes of legitimization, codification, and standardization” (Modiano, 2003, p. 36). As a consequence, a Euro-English speaker will typically speak a mixture of unmarked RP features and features of GA (Modiano, 1996b, p. 211). Further, Modiano contends that the conditions are ripe for the formation of ‘MAE’/’Euro-English’, especially after Britain’s withdrawal from the EU: it should act as an official language for cross-cultural communication within the EU. Euro-English will evolve in much the same manner as other second-language varieties of English, such as Indian and Nigerian Englishes. According to Modiano, this would best reflect Europeans’ needs: claiming the ownership of their distinctive lingua franca. Such positioning would represent the fundamental tenet of Kachruvian sociolinguistics.
Kachruvian sociolinguistics refers to Kachru, an Indian linguist who conceptualised the spread of English by representing it as three concentric circles. These include countries which use English as a native language, labelled as Inner Circle varieties. They are norm-providing. Countries where English is spoken as a second language, typically in postcolonial settings such as India, Malaysia, and Nigeria, belong to Kachru’s outer circle. They are norm-developing, and English became an official or co-official language in education, the media, business, the legal system, church, etc. Countries in which English is widely taught as a foreign language in school and university contexts, but in principle does not have any internal functions, are part of Kachru’s expanding circle. These countries are norm-dependent, i. e. they rely on notably BrE and AmE standards.
Returning now to Modiano’s vision of English, he illustrates his conceptualisation of the role of the English language with the aid of a model. In his diagram, speakers of English are divided into five groups: speakers of AmE, BrE, other native-English varieties of English, local, so-called second-language varieties such as Indian and Nigerian English and lastly speakers of English as a foreign language. According to Modiano, each of these five groups display three types of language features. At the very outer edge of his diagram are those language features that are culture-specific and therefore not part of Modiano’s English as an International Language core (henceforth abbreviated to EIL), the common denominator for all English users.8 They are not readily understood by most members of the other groups. For example, this may be the case when a BrE speaker addresses an international forum by employing ‘surgery’. ‘Doctor’s office’ is probably the term that is better understood internationally. The second circle represents features that have the potential to become international currency and hence can neither be clearly allocated to the outer area nor the common core in Modiano’s model. Modiano illustrates this with the Australian lexical item ‘station’, a ‘sheep farm’ or ‘ranch’ (2020, p. 76). The third language type refers to the centre of his model. It represents those features of international comprehensibility. These speakers in the centre use English as an International Language (Modiano 2009, p. 97). Modiano’s model of English is extremely useful, especially due to its focus on international comprehensibility. Ultimately, it is vital that English speakers in international settings apply a “dynamic linguistic relativism”. This encapsulates recognition of variation and change. It will, in Crystal’s opinion, be the “chief challenge facing ELT specialists” (Crystal, 2001, p. 63).
Crystal therefore advocates World Standard Spoken English (henceforth abbreviated to WSSE), a ‘variety’ used, for instance, at international conferences, where all interlocutors make a conscious effort to avoid the idiosyncratic features of their national varieties, be it BrE, AmE or any other English, native or non-native. In this manner, he places both NS as well as NNS users of English on an equal footing by linguistically establishing a democratic basis with a high potential for mutual understanding. Crystal even maintains that WSSE, a neutral ‘variety’, intelligible to all English speakers, “will make redundant the British/American distinction. British and American English will still exist, of course, but as varieties expressing national identity in the UK and USA. For global purposes, WSSE will suffice” (2003a, p. 189). Still, the notion of ‘MAE’ as defined by Modiano highlights the interplay of the two major systems. He views ‘MAE’ as being “indicative of an awareness of how American and British English features can be used strategically to benefit the communicative act.” In his opinion, this ‘MAE’ usage among the L2 English-language user contingency together with “features from mainland European languages, as well as new coinages invented” will result in the emergence of “a distinct and potential variety in its own right” (Modiano, 2009, p. 62). As posited by him, it will have second language status in the same manner as Indian, South African and Nigerian English has.
In view of the foregoing considerations, the following sub-chapter delves deeper into this new perspective on EFL teaching: the interface between the concepts of Mid-Atlantic and Euro-English.
2.6.2 Mid-Atlantic English and Euro-English
2.6.2.1 Introduction
This section will provide a succinct overview of a complex emergent phenomenon in international settings labelled as Euro-English9 which, in Modiano’s view, will grow out of ‘MAE’, itself also a utopian ‘variety’. Other scholars commonly favour the term English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth abbreviated to ELF) (Jenkins, 2007; Modiano, 2009, p. 62) rather than English as an International Language (henceforth abbreviated to EIL) or Euro-English. All three terms refer to lingua franca uses of English primarily among the non-native speaker community with negligible differences in meaning. Jenkins sets out the reason why ‘ELF’ is the more widely used term in academia:
ELF emphasizes the role of English in communication between speakers from different L1s, i. e. the primary reason for learning English today; it suggests the idea of community as opposed to alienness; it emphasizes that people have something in common rather than their differences; it implies that ‘mixing’ [emphasis added] languages is acceptable … and thus there is nothing inherently wrong in retaining certain characteristics of the L1, such as accent, finally, the Latin name symbolically removes the ownership of English from the Anglos both to no one and, in effect, to everyone”. (Jenkins, 2000, p. 11)
This novel manifestation of ELF in its global uses will necessitate reappraisal of the sociolinguistic and pedagogical status of EFL. It will no longer support the singularity principle, in the guise of BrE, for example.
With respect to the mainstream definitions of the putative new ‘variety’ ELF, they are predicated on the premise of pluricentricity. This includes not only ESL and EFL but also ENL speakers. The proponents of an ELF conceptualisation in English Language Teaching (henceforth abbreviated to ELT) claim they do not take a ‘deficiency’ perspective akin to Quirk’s deficit linguistics ideology but a ‘difference’ one, avoiding such notions as native-like accuracy, (Harmer, 2007b, pp. 142–144; Legutke et al., 2009, p. 84; Lewis, 1993, pp. 52–54), failed native speakers, interference, fossilisation and so forth (Cook 1999, p. 196). Proponents of ELF seek to break away from notions of correctness. They are in favour of prioritising intelligibility, fostering innovation and promoting comity, i. e. building up friendly relationships with interlocutors from different L1 and cultural backgrounds (Jenkins, 2000, pp. 123–134; McKay, 2002, p. 75). Additionally, the concept of ELF also recognises the great significance of code-mixing and switching as bilingual resources, whereas traditional EFL views them as interference errors. Subscribers to the ELF concept also espouse the notions of co-constructiveness, listener-orientation, and non-normativity of prestige varieties.
In their view, the highlighting of these parameters for optimising mutual intelligibility among English speakers of different L1 backgrounds also presupposes the avoidance of “unilateral idiomaticity” (Seidlhofer, 2004, p. 220). This term coined by Seidlhofer refers to those situations in international encounters when one interlocutor uses an opaque idiomatic expression with which the other participant is likely to be unfamiliar. Therefore, in international forums for instance, it might be more appropriate to say “Can I help you?” instead of “Would you like me to give you a hand?” ELF endorsers consequently expostulate on a tradition-bound EFL pedagogy because in their view, it supposedly eradicates the criterion of learners’ NNS identity. They posit that EFL learners are fundamentally under the regime of the two main inner-circle varieties and therefore are expected to integrate into the BrE or AmE culture. ELF, to their way of thinking, is a constant identity negotiation process, fostering the maintenance of the NNS identities. In addition, the ELF concept no longer clings to the belief that a close approximation of an idealised NS accent is a precondition for becoming an international speaker of English (Jenkins, 2007, pp. 59–60, 81–92).
A useful definition of this new conceptual model of ELF10 can be found on the website of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (henceforth abbreviated to VOICE), whose founding and project director is Barbara Seidlhofer. VOICE captures spoken ELF interactions for purposes of research. Seidlhofer’s research area is lexis/lexico-grammar, of which she is in charge with her team. Their current research explores ELF features such as dropping the third person present tense, confusing the relative pronouns ‘who’ and ‘which’, the change of uncountable nouns to countable nouns (e. g. ‘furnitures’, ‘accommodations’, etc.), zero marking of the third person singular present tense, use of invariant question tags11, insertion of redundant prepositions, e. g. discuss about, the use of the verb stem instead of the gerund in “I look forward to see [sic] you”, etc. (cf. Jenkins, 2003, p. 131).
Given the changing nature of English in the direction of a prospective lingua franca within the European Union (henceforth abbreviated to EU), it is essential to be cognisant of its linguistic landscape. In Europe, English exists alongside 23 other official languages but seems to be emerging as the most utilitarian European lingua franca. This potential lingua franca landscape of English is equated by Jenkins to Asian Englishes, which within the spirit of Kachru’s liberation linguistics had locally developed into endonormative second-language varieties (Jenkins, 2003, p. 38). However, the rather speculative assumption of Europeans moving towards their own potential distinctive putative ‘variety’ has lacked the empirical basis to date. The following section will therefore critically look into the notion of ‘variety’ to create a clear understanding of the current standard controversy in EFL teaching with regard to the label Euro English, which is inextricably linked to that of ‘MAE’ and ELF.
2.6.2.2 The Variety Status of Euro-English
In response to an obvious research need for the gauging of Euro-English variety status, Mollin suggested a catalogue of criteria to ascertain if “a potential independent variety of English in Europe” is emerging (2006, p. 5). She set out three requirements to determine the hypothetical variety status of Euro-English: expansion of function, nativisation of form, and institutionalisation of norms, i. e. the codification and official recognition of the new variety (2006, pp. 45–52).
In order to empirically determine whether a linguistic trend is a candidate for the emergence of a variety, Mollin drew up the following tripartite checklist, which I have adapted and abridged (cf. 2006, p. 52):
• Expansion in function
ο widespread societal bilingualism, i. e. use of speakers’ indigenous language(s) for local identity alongside their English
ο sociolinguistic analysis in several domains, i. e. education, administration, media, use of English for intranational and interpersonal communication, use in creative writing
• Nativisation of linguistic structures
ο tendency towards linguistic homogeneity in the speech community at the phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmatic level (i. e. the variety’s commonalities)
ο increasing spread of novel features into society
ο gradual development towards a local norm, e. g. the prospective consolidation of Euro-English as a distinctive variety
• Institutionalisation of a new standard
ο acceptance of the variety and its label, e. g. Euro-English, Mid-Atlantic English
ο absence of divergence between the new performance model and the speech community’s linguistic behaviour, positive language attitudes towards the variety
ο authoritative codification sets in and the variety is officially recognised, it consequently shifts away from Kachru’s expanding circle to the outer circle
Based on the criteria catalogue succinctly presented above, Mollin carried out an empirical study to evaluate the variety status of Euro-English. Her guiding research question was whether Euro-English has its own independent form. To be more specific, her project set out to investigate if Euro-English exhibits common lexico-grammatical and morpho-syntactic features from various L1 languages to qualify as a novel nativised variety. She used a 400,000-word large corpus of Euro-English (2006, p. 93). It included a spoken component in the form of public discussions and public speeches, broadly representative of EU speech patterns of politicians, officials, and journalists from different countries. The written component consisted of spontaneous online writing, e. g. discussion groups and chat rooms with EU politicians and ordinary citizens.
For her research, Mollin suggested variables that might mark off Euro-English from the two major varieties, e. g. in terms of lexis: ‘actual’ for ‘current’, ‘eventual’ for ‘possible’, the semantic conflation of ‘possibility’ and ‘opportunity’. With respect to morpho-syntax, for example, she investigated the omission of the third person singular -s, plural marker -s with uncountable nouns, interchangeability of the relative pronouns ‘who’ and ‘which’, complementation, question tags, do-support, etc. (2006, pp. 103 ff.). Mollin’s research outcome revealed that her respondents’ specific uses of some individual cases are closely related to their deficiency in English rather than to their deliberate choice. From the author’s standpoint, her findings are therefore not indicators of a nativised variety but “an amalgam of idiosyncratic learner Englishes” and hence not typical features “that transcend individual speakers and individual cases” (2006, p. 155).
To implement her research project, Mollin administered her questionnaire via e-mail and the survey population was made up of academics such as university lecturers from 21 countries. First, participants were submitted to an acceptability test with typical Euro-English structures adapted from Murray12, in which they were asked to decide if the suggested structures were in their view correct or not. In case of mistakes, participants had to provide a correct alternative. Another part of the questionnaire targeted Mollin’s informants’ general beliefs and attitudes towards English. They had to state their agreement or disagreement on a scale of five items that ranged from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. The results supported the claim that Europeans are not in favour of a developing endo-normative standard, i. e. the norms are no longer taken over from BrE or AmE. In this connection, the author mentioned that “the option that is most interesting to us, namely Euro-English, was chosen by only 5,4 % of respondents” (2006, p. 174). She infers that “speaking like the other non-native Europeans do is thus obviously not appealing to the sampled academics” (2006, p. 174). The English her respondents are trying to approximate is rather ‘International English’13, with 30.9 % of them doing so and 37.5 % using BrE, which is clearly ahead of AmE with 12.9 %. Regarding the legitimacy of the label Euro-English, Mollin asserts on the basis of her statistical outcome that “we cannot describe Euro-English as an institutionalized variety”. She further concludes that the endorsement of “non-native patterns of English is clearly related to mother tongue and competence in English, but not to the support for Euro-English” (2006, p. 195). Hence, English remains a foreign language in the European context. Thus, it would be more appropriate to utilise the label ‘register’ for Europeans’ speech patterns, referring to a specific function rather than a specific group. In actual fact, it can be observed that ELF features within Europe strongly rely both on specific situations speakers have to linguistically cope with as well as their communication purposes. Furthermore, the nature of interactions among non-native speakers of English proves to be as diverse as the speakers’ English proficiency and there is still paucity of ELF linguistic evidence, so that the label ‘variety’ cannot be given credit (Gnutzmann & Intemann, 2008, p. 17).
With regard to assessing the type of English spoken in educational settings, it would be also revealing to replicate Mollin’s study, but with upper secondary and university students, as they represent an important section of European societies. Their primary contact code is English as well, which especially holds true for mobility programmes like Erasmus. Referring back to Mollin’s study, it could therefore also be argued that her sampling of middle-aged university lecturers may call into question their representativeness of attitudes to and perceptions of Euro-English. Further research is needed here.
2.6.2.3 Standard Language Ideology
As discussed above, Mollin takes a stance on Euro-English from a deficit linguistic perspective by not recognising English as having functional lingua franca status. Nonetheless, within the framework of standard language ideologies in EFL teaching, the view of some scholars markedly contrasts Mollin’s. They believe that the increased use of English and widespread exposure to it in Europe will result in the emergence of a variety or varieties. Still, there are somewhat different opinions on whether a putative new form of English qualifies as endo-normative, viz. a locally grown variety, or as exonormative, viz. reliance on mostly BrE norms.
Modiano (as cited in Berns, 1995, p. 7) has Kachruvian linguistics as his theoretical sociolinguistic point of departure and in his work refers to the label “Euro-English”, the alleged ‘variety’ spoken by mainland Europeans. He posits that Europeans mix the two main varieties and no longer attempt to speak BrE exclusively. In his view, ‘Euro-English’ resultant from the conflation of BrE and AmE, viz. ‘MAE’ will evolve into a second-language variety for mainland Europe. His postulate refers to empirical studies of the difference and convergence of BrE and AmE in the Swedish EFL context that he carried out himself together with some of his colleagues (cf. Modiano, 2002). Modiano further argues that the culture-specific features of the L 2 users’ languages in Europe will ultimately be codified. Hence, ‘Euro-English’ addresses the novel sociolinguistic profile, which has built up within the EU14: English operates as the primary lingua franca. Modiano envisages two stages regarding the emergence of this new alleged European ‘variety’. The first stage can be defined as a transitional one. It is ‘MAE’, marked by the amalgam of the two main varieties in the speech of Europeans, and the second is the emergence of ‘Euro-English’, which, like ‘MAE’, has the potential for promoting better cross-cultural communication (Modiano, 2009, p. 62). Modiano also stresses that he perceives no general difference between outer-circle second languages on the one hand and the EFL usage in Europe on the other. According to him, they ought to be on an equal footing with respect to their ‘variety’ status.
However, Seidlhofer and Jenkins do not appear to be inclined towards a conceptualisation of English within the Kachruvian paradigm. On the contrary, they express vehement opposition to a native speaker point of reference by promoting a gradual departure from Inner Circle norms and targeting the establishment of endo-normative English standards (Jenkins, 2000, pp. 233–235; Seidlhofer, 2017). Yet, it might be objected that their understanding of how English is meant to function as a lingua franca is extremely controversial for EFL settings because its structural lingua franca features have not matured yet.
Although their work deserves tremendous respect, it can be argued that Seidlhofer’s and Jenkins’ conceptualisation of English will lead to a glaring discrepancy between their propagation of relative freedom of speaking and the demands for standard forms placed on those EFL users who write in English for an international target audience, scientists, for example. Their line of reasoning is therefore disputable, because what EFL pedagogy needs is a coherent and solid sociolinguistic framework for both teachers and students upon which they can rely.
Regarding the issue of reappraising EFL methodologies by bringing them in line with an acrolectal lingua franca pattern, it is appropriate to briefly mention Jenkins’ research. Jenkins’ research explores English pronunciation teaching with an emphasis on mutual intelligibility rather than NS language norms. With her publications, she popularised a core of Lingua Franca features (Jenkins, 2000, 2003, 2007), the so-called “Lingua Franca Core” (henceforth abbreviated to LFC) (2007, pp. 23 ff.). It is based on the premise that different ‘varieties’ of Euro-English can develop, each having its distinctive features: e. g. German English with no phonological distinction between ‘think’ and ‘sink’, or French English, where in ‘hot’, the vowel is unrounded and hence approximates more the vowel sound of ‘hut’ (cf. Jenkins, 2001, p. 18). In her research papers, Jenkins discusses the core and non-core phonological features destined for NNSs.
The following is an abridged, non-exhaustive overview of the core and non-core phonological features:
• All English consonant sounds are to be mastered except for the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/. These dental fricatives are non-core features. In Jenkins’ view, they do not impede intelligibility. Possible substitutions are /f/ and /v/, which commonly occur in Cockney English, for example.
• Speakers just need to pronounce the clear /l/. The dark /l/’ [ɫ]) becomes a redundant sound. In Jenkins’ opinion, L-Vocalisation might also be acceptable, but more extensive research is needed to substantiate its communicative usefulness.
• Learners are not allowed to simplify consonant clusters at the beginning of words, i. e. the /r/ at the start of ‘product’, for example, must not be dropped.
• Vowel length contrasts, e. g. the difference in length between the vowel sounds in the words ‘live’ and ‘leave’ should generally be respected.
• No voicing of medial /t/, i. e. ‘latter’ is not to be pronounced in the GA way.
• No insistence on stress timing.
• The /ɜː/ vowel sound like in ‘girl’ must be pronounced accurately.
• Nuclear or tonic stress (i. e. the word which is stressed within a ‘tone group’) is important for a lingua franca speaker: ‘Let’s meet NEXT Friday’ and ‘Let’s meet next FRIDAY’.
• The schwa-sound /ə/. The use of the full vowel sound in place of /ə/ is also stipulated by Jenkins as a non-core feature (Jenkins, 2000, p. 147). English learners can however add a short schwa (/ə/) at the end of a word ending with a consonant, but this should not create another word with which it might be confused (e. g. ‘hard’ sounding like ‘harder’).
• The placement of the word stresses whose variability is considerable across L1 varieties is also part of Jenkins’ non-core taxonomy.
With respect to the implementation of Jenkins’ suggested phonology of English as an international language, she stresses that her LFC ought not to be regarded as prescriptive but rather as a guideline to which learners might resort in order to communicate effectively in international settings (Jenkins, 2007, pp. 238; 2005, 535–543). Nevertheless, the rationale behind Jenkins’ LFC concept is disputable for at least the following three reasons (Jenkins, 2000, pp. 123–134).
Firstly, when critically rehearsing Jenkins’ standard language ideology associated with her LFC, her posture towards NSs of English is tantamount to a socio-linguistic and pedagogical affront. She argues that NSs of English will be “relegated to a back seat” (Jenkins, 2000, p. 201). As a corollary, her manner of sociolinguistic reasoning implies that EFL learners’ approximation of NS accents is being downgraded (2000, p. 204). Moreover, NSs will also be obliged to adapt their speech patterns to NNSs’ ones by appropriating the LFC core features (2000, p. 201; 2007, p. 135). Trudgill’s stance (as cited in Schmitt, 2016, p. 43) is unequivocal regarding this phonological aspect of accommodation: “So there we are then. After thirty years of using my own native […] English in international contexts (and, as I have immodestly supposed, accommodating to international audiences with some degree of success), I will have to relearn how to pronounce my own language effectively.” Furthermore, Jenkins15 and other endorsers of her LFC concept posit that the above suggested conceptual overhaul of English is conducive to expressing English learners’ identities through their respective L1 accents. Jenkins therefore clearly postulates that most ELF learners want to retain their accented rendition of English (Jenkins, 2000, p. 16). Research, however, brought to light that learners very often do not want to sound foreign. Against this backdrop, it can also be argued that an L1 accent is not always seen in a favourable light by EFL learners’ interlocutors. It might be regarded as a lack of skill or motivation of acquiring English as a foreign language. I have noticed during my teaching that there is a considerable category of students who aim for native-like competence in a sustained, hard effort and with great skill. Schmitt aptly labels this endeavour “the pronunciation as art function” (2016, p. 25).
Along the same lines, it is also useful to refer to Timmis’s large-scale study, which investigated NNS teachers’ and learners’ posture towards the most appropriate pedagogical model of English. In terms of pronunciation, 67 % of all student informants revealed their preference for NS pronunciation and not for an L2 accented version of English (2002). As a result, the issue of the ultimate attainment in native-like acquisition of English cannot be somewhat simplistically discarded as non-negligible. From a pedagogical and psychological point of view, when NSs compliment EFL students and EFL teachers on their almost impeccable English, this gives both groups a much-needed boost of self-confidence and self-esteem that are important keys to increasing their achievements as students and teachers. In addition, a significant number of the EFL constituency often shows great interest in travelling to English-speaking countries such as the UK, not least for cultural and linguistic reasons. Hence, as Gnutzmann put it, “it seems highly appropriate that pupils learn and get to know English as a Foreign Language, i. e. a language that explicitly refers to the native English-speaking territories and societies” (2008, pp. 116–117). Viewed from a classroom perspective, it can be argued that Timmis’s balanced viewpoint establishes its considerable relevance to the EFL constituency regarding the NS vs NNS controversy: “While it is clearly inappropriate to foist native-speaker norms on students who neither want or need them, it is clearly scarcely more appropriate to offer students a target which manifestly does not meet their aspirations” (Timmis, 2002, p. 249).16
Secondly, another point of critique in relation to Jenkins’ LFC model is her research methodology and scope when she lists those pronunciation features that allegedly involve breakdowns in intelligible NNS-NNS communication. As this model was developed for hundreds of millions of English speakers on the globe, the data base can limit the reliability of her research outcome. In actual fact, Jenkins’ empirical investigation only relates to “two studies, an experiment, and a corpus of field observations” (Jenkins, 2000, p. 123). Information on the scope of the material and the composition of the research participants are rather scarce. Furthermore, she only probed into participants from three different L1 backgrounds, viz. Japanese, Swiss German, Swiss French (Jenkins, 2000, p. 84). To get a fuller and sociolinguistically more conclusive picture of NNS-NNS communication, it would have been more appropriate if Jenkins had chosen participants from more diverse language backgrounds.
While Jenkins’ pedagogical approach may be tempting, it may, however, not be a sagacious approach to promoting the LFC as a model. To date, there has been paucity of comprehensive and reliable descriptions of the ways in which EFL learners are making use of English (Gnutzmann & Intemann, 2008, p. 17). Therefore, thirdly, explicit mention should be made here with respect to Jenkins’ proposal of excluding the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/. The question arises of what should replace them. Should /f/ and /v/ become elements of the LFC, which are variants of Cockney English (Wells, 1982b, p. 328)?
Another option would be that they are superseded by /t/ and /d/, similar to speech patterns of many people in Ireland and some speakers of New Englishes. If such substitution is encouraged when speakers with a /t/ and /d/ pronunciation travel through Europe, where /s/ and /z/ are commonly found, e. g. in German English, communication problems may end up exacerbating them instead of being avoided. In terms of choosing an accent model, it appears that the RP accent is currently still a bona fide ‘lingua franca’ accent, be it throughout the UK, some other English-speaking countries or within the EFL community across Europe and beyond. RP parlance means that everyone can understand it. Like GA, RP has been extensively described and was solidly and thoroughly codified. Its appropriation is, in my opinion, not an esoteric skill that can be only acquired by language geniuses. It is possible with systematic and ongoing training. Celce-Murcia et al. (as cited in Schmitt, 2016, p. 48) argue in this respect that “adults are capable of rising to the challenge of performing competently−if not exceptionally−in a new sound system”. If EFL teaching places the teaching of pronunciation on an equal footing with the language areas of lexis and lexico-grammar by not treating it as the “Cinderella of language teaching”, teachers will therefore cater for EFL students to be readily intelligible when interacting with both NSs and NNSs (Schmitt, 2016, p. 15).
After having dealt with the ‘Mid-Atlantic’ and Euro-English paradigms, which are closely connected to standard language ideology, the following chapter looks more closely at the notions of Standard British English and Standard American English. Both these varieties represent the cornerstones of my research.
1 Also referred to as Global English, Lingua Franca English and World English (cf. Brinton & Arnovick, 2017, p. 485).
2 WSSE stands for World Standard Spoken English (cf. Crystal, 2003a, p. 185).
3 A typical BrE culture-specific expression is, for example: “it was like Clapham Junction here.” International speakers are well advised to say “it was very busy or crowded here.”
4 In a personal email communication, Modiano specified that the studies in his anthology Studies in Mid-Atlantic English, to which two of my reviews refer (cf. Axelsson-Westergren and Söderlund & Modiano), were all more or less from 2002 (Modiano, personal communication, August 15, 2018).
5 An MTV video-jockey is a person who introduces music videos on TV, such as MTV.
6 ENL stands for English as a Native Language (inner circle variety), ESL for English as a Second Language (outer circle variety) and EFL for English as a Foreign Language (expanding circle variety).
7 Extramural English may serve as an umbrella term for other similar ones: unintentional learning, incidental learning, out-of-class learning or even colloquially spare time English (cf. Sundqvist, 2009, pp. 25–26).
8 Jenkins and Modiano use the labels English as an International Language (EIL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) indiscriminately (Jenkins, 2007, p. xi; Modiano, 2009, p. 86). Seidlhofer stresses that most ELF interactions are among NNSs of English. ELF is therefore a contact language, whose users do not share a common native tongue and “for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication” (Seidlhofer, 2005, p. 339). Based on this definition, Seidlhofer explicates that “ELF is part of the more general phenomenon of ‘English as an international language’ (EIL)” (2005, p. 339).
9 The following scholars delved deeper into the issue of Euro-English/International English/English as a Lingua Franca, all of them on the basis of empirical studies: Erling 2004; Jenkins, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007; Kirkpatrick, 2007; McKay 2002, 2018; Modiano, 1999a/b, 2009; Mollin 2006; Seidlhofer, 1999, 2004, 2013.
10 ELF is described as “an additionally acquired language system which serves as a common means of communication for speakers of different first languages” (Seidlhofer, 2013).
11 Crystal gives numerous examples where invariant tags are in use in other varieties of English: in Welsh and South Asian English, for example. ‘Innit?’ is used in Cockney English (Crystal, 2003b, p. 299).
12 Cf. Mercedes Durham’s doctoral thesis English in Switzerland: Inherent Variation in a Non-native Speech Community (2007).
13 Given the ambiguity of the term ‘International English’, she states that “we cannot assume that the figures for this international variety signal support for the empowerment of non-native speakers” (Mollin, 2006, p. 174).
14 It is worth pointing out that this phenomenon of lingua franca usage also occurs in non-EU countries such as Switzerland (cf. Durham, 2006; Murray, 2003).
15 In response to Modiano’s recent article English in a post-Brexit European Union, it becomes clear that Jenkins has shifted her initial ELF conceptualisation towards a vision of “English within multilinguism”, which she labels as “English as a multilingual franca (EMF)” (Jenkins, 2017, p. 345). Within the European context of applying translanguaging, Jenkins defines the functionality of English as “multilingual communication in which English is available as a contact language of choice, but is not necessarily chosen” (2017, p. 345). Mauranen, in a similar vein, views ELF interactions as a dynamic process, whereby the notion of “languaging” with language is being perceived as a system “continually created in social interaction” (2018, p. 15).
16 The idealised status of native-speakerism resulting in a stigmatising dichotomy of native and non-native speakers has been thoroughly discussed by Bouchard and Lowe (2017, pp. 55–59; 2020, pp. 26–31).
