Читать книгу Understanding English as a Lingua Franca - Barbara Seidlhofer - Страница 6

This book is about English as an international language. This, of course, is a topic that has been extensively discussed elsewhere, and I take as my starting point comments made by David Graddol in his wide-ranging study English Next (Graddol 2006). In his introduction to the book, Graddol summarizes the main findings of his earlier treatment of the topic (Graddol 1997) in a list of bullet points. The first of these is that ‘the future development of English as a global language might be less straightforward than had been assumed’. He then comments as follows:

It is difficult to recapture the sense of complacency evident amongst some native English speakers in the mid-1990s for whom even the first of these points provided a challenge. The global ‘triumph’ of English was understood as a done deal. And, given the widespread recent discussion in the west about the global impact of China, it is equally difficult to appreciate the general lack of awareness, little more than five years ago, of the rapid transformation already then taking place in East Asia. But the world has been changing so fast that it scarcely seems to be the same place as that of the 1990s1 …

(Graddol 2006: 10)

What has not changed, Graddol observes, is the enormous global demand for learning English, with learners becoming ever more numerous, and beginning at an ever earlier age. The popularity of English has become a fact so familiar that it is hardly newsworthy any more. However, he continues:

But at what point do we pause, take a fresh look at what is happening and decide that what is going on now is not just ‘more of the same’. After scrutinising current trends, including those which have not yet reached the statistical yearbooks, I conclude that there has been a significant – even dramatic – qualitative change: one that may be taking the language in a very new direction.

(Graddol 2006: 10f., emphasis added)

It is precisely this ‘very new direction’ that the present book sets out to explore. Its basic message is that the dramatic ‘qualitative change’ Graddol is referring to is due to the role that English now plays as a global lingua franca, and that this must have significant consequences for the language itself and the way we conceive of it.

Of course nobody would dispute the fact that English has spread all over the globe to become the predominant international language. This, after all, is the principal reason why it figures as the primary foreign or other language in school curricula all over the world. In the early 21st century, English is not only an international language, but the international language.

It is impossible to give exact figures for ‘speakers of English’, not least because just how you define who qualifies as a speaker is bound to be arbitrary.2 So while estimates of speakers are bound to be vague, the orders of magnitude seem to be fairly clear. Here are some figures, which taken together certainly amount to the conclusion that ‘native speakers’ of English are clearly outnumbered by ‘non-native speakers’: Crystal (2003b: 69) gives the following estimates for speakers of English in terms of Kachru’s model of ‘concentric circles’ (Kachru 1992): ‘Inner Circle’, i.e. first language in, for example, UK, USA: 320–380 million; ‘Outer Circle’, i.e. additional language, in India, Nigeria: 300–500 million; ‘Expanding Circle’, i.e. foreign language, in China, Russia: 500–1000 million.3 This means that ‘one in four of the world’s population are now capable of communicating to a useful level in English’ (Crystal 2006a: 425) and in turn, that roughly only one out of every four users of English in the world is a ‘native speaker’ of the language. While this insight should not lead us to ignore the fact that about three quarters of the world’s population are left without such command of English and often without even any prospect of gaining access to it, it does not alter the fact that the spread of English, geographically but also in terms of social strata and domains of use, is on a scale that no other language has ever reached in the history of the planet. The German author Beneke (1991: 54) adds another way of looking at this when he estimates that 80 per cent of all communication involving the use of English as a second or foreign language does not involve any ‘native speakers’ of English. This was as long ago as 1991, and bearing in mind the growing figures for speakers in the ‘Outer’ and ‘Expanding Circles’, the percentage Beneke quotes is likely to be even higher now.

The global spread of English is unprecedented and unparalleled, and comparisons that are often made between the role of English in today’s world and the role of Latin, French, Arabic, and other lingua francas in earlier times simply do not hold. No other language called ‘world language’ has ever had both the global expansion and the penetration of social strata and domains of use that English now has. This fact may sometimes irk speakers of other ‘big’ languages, such as those of French in the European Union, but even they cannot but reluctantly acknowledge it. The reluctance in part at least would seem to stem from the view that the reasons for the rapid ongoing growth of English lie in the economic and political power, past and present, of English speaking nations, especially the United States, and so to concede the international role of the language is, to a degree, to succumb to this power. The view that the spread of English is necessarily a function of linguistic imperialism is one that I shall return to in a later chapter. For the moment, we need to note that the international significance of the language cannot be explained in such simple and seemingly straightforward terms.

The term ‘English as an international language’ (EIL) is usually understood as covering uses of English within and across Kachru’s ‘Circles’, for intranational as well as international communication. But English is international in two very different ways: it has been ‘exported’ to many regions of the world by its ‘native’ speakers, primarily through colonization, and so has invaded these places. It has, however, to an even larger extent been ‘imported’ by people all over the world who decided to learn it as a useful language in addition to their first language(s).

In the first case, generally as a consequence of colonial rule, English has been taken up in various places in the world and institutionalized as a local means of intra-national communication in countries in what Kachru (1992) refers to as the ‘Outer Circle’: we might call these manifestations of localized EIL. It is now generally acknowledged that the variations in usage that have naturally developed endonormatively in the communities of this ‘Outer Circle’ have their own legitimacy, and are, in effect, different Englishes in their own right; and a good deal of work has been devoted to recording and codifying their distinctive character. Schneider’s 2007 book Postcolonial English conveys this sense of the local, and locale, very clearly. In discussing the perspectives of the settlers and the indigenous populations in (former) colonies, he explains that:

[…] the essential point […] is that both groups who share a piece of land increasingly share a common language experience and communication ethnography, and thus the forces of accommodation are effective in both directions and in both communities, and result in dialect convergence and increasingly large shared sets of linguistic features and conventions.

(Schneider 2007: 32)

These ‘shared sets of linguistic features and conventions’ then serve to define essentially nation-based local linguacultural norms as the basis for delimiting distinct post-colonial varieties with their independent identities. This is how ‘English’ becomes (World) ‘Englishes’, with countable distinct entities. Thus it is now established as entirely appropriate to speak of Indian English, Nigerian English, or Singapore English, for example.4

But apart from this pluralized, localized EIL, English has also become international as a, indeed the, common global means for inter-national communication. This then is not localized but globalized EIL, which is characterized by continuously negotiated, hybrid ways of speaking. Other than members of ‘Outer Circle’ varieties, speakers do not orient to their local speech communities but are involved in de-territorialized speech events, so that establishing common linguacultural ground, what Schegloff (1972) calls ‘formulating place’, becomes an intrinsic part of every encounter. Globalized EIL, as a variable way of using English can be observed, for example, in business meetings, tourist encounters, diplomatic negotiations, conference discussions, and so on.

This distinction between localized EIL and globalized EIL is one that Kachru’s model does not capture, for the use of globalized EIL is something that people engage in across all three ‘concentric circles’: from the ‘Inner Circle’, where English is the majority first language (for example, the UK, USA), from the ‘Outer Circle’, where English is an additional language (India, Nigeria, Singapore) and – as the largest group – from the ‘Expanding Circle’, where English is taught and learnt as a foreign language (from Afghanistan, Bolivia, China, Denmark, Ethiopia, … to Yemen). In these contexts, English is used as a convenient common means of communication among people with different native languages. It is the massive and increasing extent of these uses, stimulated by developments in electronic communication and enhanced mobility, that has been primarily responsible for establishing English globally as the predominant international language – English as a Lingua Franca.