The Lingua Franca Factor

Author's Copy The lingua franca factor ALAN FIRTH Abstract This article explores the question of whether there is anything peculiar— linguistically, discursively, and interactionally—about English as a lingua franca. Is there, in other words, a ‘‘lingua franca’’ factor at play? If, as some have speculated, this is indeed the case, in uncovering unique features of English as a lingua franca, we can hope to produce detailed descriptions and pedagogical materials that will further bolster the status of English as a lingua franca within Applied Linguistics, that will enhance our understanding of matters relating to multilingualism, multicompetence, additional language learning, intercultural communication, and spoken interaction. The article contends that there is a ‘‘lingua franca factor,’’ but argues that it resides not in the language or discourse forms produced, but in two other spheres, one being entailment, the other in metatheory. ‘‘Entailment’’ concerns the inherent interactional and linguistic variability that lingua franca interactions entail. ‘‘Metatheory’’ refers to theoretical underpinnings and dispositions brought about by adopting a lingua franca outlook on language. Author's Copy 1. The lingua franca factor Is there something unique or peculiar about lingua franca interactions? Do lingua franca interactions entail behavioral patterns and dispositions not found in monolingual L1 encounters, or L1–L2 (so-called ‘‘nativenonnative’’) encounters? Is lingua franca English a form or variety of English in its own right, capable of being ‘‘codified’’ and ‘‘modeled’’ and presented as an alternative to the more traditional ‘‘standard’’ English models conventionally found in ELT materials? If, as some have speculated, this is indeed the case, in uncovering unique features of English as a lingua franca, we can hope to produce detailed descriptions and Intercultural Pragmatics 6-2 (2009), 147–170 DOI 10.1515/IPRG.2009.009 1612-295X/09/0006–0147 6 Walter de Gruyter Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 148 Alan Firth Author's Copy English used at international conferences often shows features at variance with the English of England but shared by other speakers. Continental meanings of eventual and actual, continental uses of tenses, calques on French formulas of conference procedure, various details of pronunciation, and dozens of other features mark the English as an emerging continental norm. Native speakers of English attending the conference may find themselves using some of these features as the verbal interaction takes place. (1982: xvi–xvii) Anecdotal evidence is increasingly being replaced by empirical evidence, as the Vienna VOICE (Seidlhofer 2001a) and the Helsinki ELFA corpora1 (Mauranen 2003, 2006a) attest. Researchers involved in these corpora-based projects are searching for patterns, consistencies and systematicities across the communicative spectrum of ELF interactions— throughout Europe and the world beyond. The empirical ‘‘turn’’ in ELF scholarship has not dampened speculation that particular (‘‘non-native’’) varieties of English may be emerging. This speculation has been concentrated mostly on a putative ‘‘European English.’’ Thus Berns (1995), Jenkins et al. (2001), McArthur (2003), Modiano (1999, 2003), and Seidlhofer et al. (2006) have recently ventured that we may be able to observe the ‘‘first signs of something like a characteristic emergent European English’’ (Seidlhofer et al. 2006: 9). Presently, though, relatively little is known and the proverbial jury is still out. Some scholars (e.g., Firth 1990, 1991, 1996, 2009; Firth and Wagner 2007; Gramkow Andersen 1993; Wagner and Firth 1997; Haegaman 2002; Meierkord 1998, 2000; Author's Copy Author's Copy pedagogical materials that will further bolster the status of English as a lingua franca (hereafter ELF) within Applied Linguistics, that will enhance our understanding of matters relating to multilingualism (House 2003; Canagarajah 2007), multicompetence (Cook 2002), additional language learning (Firth and Wagner 2007), intercultural communication (Knapp and Meierkord 2002), and spoken interaction (Firth 1996), and that will chart and uncover the daily sociolinguistic reality for millions of people around the world (Crystal 2003). We will thus be in a position to begin to close the ‘‘conceptual gap’’ identified and discussed by Seidlhofer (2001a), where a stark contrast is seen to exist between linguistic and pragmatic descriptions of the phenomenon of ELF and ELF’s global preponderance as a language of contact between those who do not share a mother tongue. Such speculations on the possible uniqueness of ELF have existed for decades. Quirk, writing in 1970 (Quirk 1970: 68), observed a growing ‘‘Europeanization of English.’’ A decade later, Ferguson made the following observation on a putative ‘‘Euro-English,’’ based on anecdotal evidence: Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 149 House 1999, 2002, 2003; Jenkins 2000, 2007; Mauranen 2006b; Seidlhofer 2001a, b, 2002, 2004; Lesznyak 2004; Prodromou 2008) have undertaken detailed empirical studies of ELF interactions. Most of this work has concentrated on the discursive and pragmatic characteristics of ELF, and noted that they are typically characterized by a high degree of interactional robustness, cooperation, consensus-seeking behavior and a‰liation, and that explicit and overt miscommunications are rare, despite variance in language form and proficiency (see e.g. Firth 1990, 1996; Gramkow Andersen 1993; Meierkord 1998; House 2002; Haegaman 2002). But the database from which existing studies have been conducted is narrow, being mainly focused either on students’ casual conversations or business encounters—in almost all cases within a Western European setting. The extant findings, then, are likely to reflect this relatively narrow empirical database. In an early publication (Firth 1990), it was noted that the ELF interactions the author had studied (international business negotiations, conducted by telephone) were characterized by the joint orientation to and production of what Go¤man (1959) had termed an interactional ‘‘working consensus’’, the consensus in this case being that interactants attend, wherever possible and feasible, to the message substrate of language, while perspicuously and adeptly disattending to speech perturbations and non-standard features in linguistic form: ‘‘This [working consensus] would appear to capture the characteristics of ‘lingua franca’ interaction’’ (Firth 1990: 276). This led, perhaps inevitably, to the following question: ‘‘. . . does the type of ‘working consensus’ in ‘lingua franca’ interactions enable us to get to the heart of the matter, namely to identify ‘lingua franca’ talk as a discourse form sui generis?’’ (Firth 1990: 276). A decade later, House (1999: 74) posed essentially the same question: ‘‘[I]t seems vital to pay more attention to the nature of ELF interactions, and ask whether and how they are di¤erent from both interactions with native speakers and non-native speakers. An answer to this question would bring us closer to finding out whether and in what ways ELF interactions are actually sui generis.’’ More recent empirical work on phonology in ELF encounters (e.g. Jenkins 2000, 2002) has led to claims that there may be transcendent ‘‘core’’ and ‘‘non-core’’ pronunciation features of ELF that are critically important in terms of achieving intelligibility between ELF speakers. This way of thinking has also been applied to ELF lexico-grammar, where similar ‘‘core’’ and ‘‘non-core’’ phenomena have been claimed to exist (see Seidlhofer 2004). As Seidlhofer (2004: 230) puts it, ‘‘[t]his . . . raises the question as to whether it is justified to refer to ELF as an emerging variety in its own right’’ (emphasis added). Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 150 Alan Firth It is this question I want to explore in this paper. In doing so I ask: Is there an ELF sui generis? Is there, in other words, a lingua franca factor? I will answer in the a‰rmative, but contend that the ‘‘lingua franca factor’’ resides not in the language or discourse forms produced, but in two other spheres, one being what I shall refer to as entailment, the other in metatheory. ‘‘Entailment’’ concerns the inherent interactional and linguistic variability that lingua franca interactions entail. ‘‘Metatheory’’ refers to theoretical underpinnings and dispositions brought about by adopting a lingua franca outlook on language. To begin, and as a way of setting the scene, I describe some of the earliest journeys through the now rapidly developing research field that is English as a lingua franca. In so doing I refer briefly to data segments and make a number of observations on them. This will allow me to cover some of the key issues, and provide the context for observations on the current status of ELF research and potentially productive future directions. 2. Categorizing ELF Author's Copy In transcribing recordings of telephone calls involving Danish dairy sales personnel and their Middle Eastern and continental European wholesale customers, Firth (1990) reports that he was faced with a dilemma, namely how to categorize the data materials. The language used in the data examined is English and the interactants were using English as a ‘‘contact’’ language, because they did not share first languages. Only three potentially relevant categories enjoyed currency in the literature: ‘‘Non-native speaker’’, ‘‘L2 learner’’, and ‘‘interlanguage’’ data. A fairly large body of research—by scholars such as Færch and Kasper (1983), Long (1983), Larsen-Freeman (1976), Gass and Varonis (1985), Varonis and Gass (1985)—existed on ‘‘non-native speaker’’ interactions, ‘‘L2 learner’’ interactions, and ‘‘interlanguage.’’ What, then, of the ‘‘L2 learner’’ epithet? The use of English in the data bore clear linguistic hallmarks of it being an additional, foreign or second language, or non-mother tongue, for those using it. The utterances in Firth’s (1990) data are replete with nonstandard collocations, non-standard verb concordances, dysfluencies and hesitation phenomena, the non-standard production of articles, pronouns and relative pronouns, as well as the production of nonce items, neologisms, and the like, but the interactants are ‘‘at work’’ and, moreover, in the way they are talking and using language more generally, are doing being ‘‘at work’’, buying and selling stupendous quantities of milk, yoghurt, cheese and micro-electronics (see, e.g. Firth 1991, 1995a, 1995b). From the emically infused ethnomethodological (Garfinkel 1967; Heritage 1984a) perspective Firth (1990) adopted, it seems contrived, ‘‘top down’’, Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 151 manipulative, etic, and detached from the data to categorize such materials as ‘‘L2 learner interactions’’—despite the apparent ‘‘performance’’ phenomena in evidence. Although some scholars might construe the speech perturbations and deployment of non-standard linguistic forms as evidence of under-developed English language proficiency, and thus of evidence of ‘‘learner English’’, the people in the recordings are not ‘‘learners’’ of English in any formal sense and, most importantly, from the ‘‘emic’’ or participant-centered perspective espoused, in a variety of complex ways the parties do not orient to, and thus do not discursively produce or ascribe to one another, ‘‘L2 learner’’ identities. Instead, they produce forms of interaction that implicitly seek to deflect attention away from their own and their interlocutor’s L2 competence and proficiency (Firth 1996). In so doing they implicitly disavow ascriptions of L2 learnership. The interactants in the corpus, then, are, in a variety of ways, ‘‘doing not being an L2 learner’’ (Firth 2009). What then of the ‘‘non-native speaker’’ and ‘‘interlanguage’’ epithets? These categorizations are closely allied to SLA research which, as vented in a series of co-authored publications (Firth and Wagner 1997, 1998; Wagner and Firth 1997), is weighed down by native-speakercentric, monolingual, modernist and structuralist biases, exemplified perhaps most clearly in the view that NNSs are perforce deficient communicators who are perpetually, agonizingly, chronically struggling, like Sisyphus and his stone, to ascend the steep incline of their ‘‘interlanguage’’, the goal being the promised land of ‘‘target competence’’, that hallowed place reserved for the fabled and idealized native speakers (Firth and Wagner 1997; Cook 1999). This view is encapsulated in various writings by SLA scholars—for example in Varonis and Gass’s (1985b: 340) contention that ‘‘[n]ative and non-native speakers are multiply handicapped in conversations with one another’’, and Long’s (1983) injunction that interactions with native speakers are ‘‘necessary and su‰cient’’ conditions for L2 acquisition. Along with others (e.g. Kramsch 2002; Cook 1999; Block 2003), Wagner and Firth have argued that, amongst other problems, such views deny agency and are irresolutely etic (analyst-centered) in orientation (Firth and Wagner 1997, 1998). What, then, of the parties’ own orientations and relevancies? What are their own ‘‘ethno-methods’’ (Garfinkel 1967) of creating, constructing and achieving situated though always fluid identities within sequences of meaningful social interaction? 3. Analyzing ELF (workplace) interaction Author's Copy In analyzing the data, we may note that although the collocations are at times remarkable (to the analyst, at least), the concordances often Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 152 Alan Firth unidiomatic, the turn-taking frequently disorderly, the phatic talk heavily formulaic, the delivery halting and the articulations quite clearly ‘‘nonstandard’’, the interactants are nevertheless demonstrably communicatively competent, and skilled commodity traders who enjoy and cultivate personable and in many cases long-standing acquaintances with one another (see, e.g., Firth 1990, 1995a, 1997; Wagner and Firth 1997; also Haegaman 2002). So although the talk might be viewed by some as variously ‘‘marked’’ and at times linguistically and discursively extraordinary, it is also real, authentic, e¤ective, expedient and, it appears, endogenously treated as contextually appropriate and ordinary. By way of exemplification, consider the following extract, involving a Danish cheese producer-wholesaler, Hansen, and his Saudi-based Lebanese-national customer, Yusuf. Hansen has called Yusuf by telephone, in response to Yusuf ’s fax, wherein Yusuf had informed Hansen that one of Hansen’s competitors (‘‘Holland’’) are currently selling feta cheese at wholesale prices below Hansen’s current prices: (1) TB:2:A:3 1 H :hh ye:s hello Mister Yusuf (.) how’re you? 2 Y mp- (.) good after- good evening (.) how’re you? 3 H I’m fine thank you 4 (2.2) 5 Y yes sir: 6 (0.5) 7 H we::ll y- you told me that uh (.) holland are selli::ng (.) feta wery 8 chea:p 9 (0.3) 10 Y yeah (.) we are- we are receiving, this 11 (2.2) 12 H ye:s 13 (0.7) 14 Y we received this (.) three container? 15 H I see 16 Y beca- because you:r price very hi::gh 17 H yes? 19 (0.8) 20 Y that’s why we are taking now this from u::h 21 (0.6) 22 :hh now this three container we brought 23 H yes? (0.5) but uh tell me uh y- you a:re receiving that in uh 24 dubai I think Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 153 Y H Y H H Y H Y H Y H Y H Y H Y H Y H (0.8) yeah (.) we’ll take in dubai (0.6) an’ then you have the on-carriage from dubai (0.5) on our own truck yes? (1.5) I [see [now this u::h (.) :hh from dubai (.) also this uh truck charges uh fuh- cheaper than uh (.) before I see (.) o:kay¼ ¼because all kuwaiti truck u::h now this available in uh dubai I see (.) o:kay (0.7) yeah but listen the:- the [very best-] [but uh ] these uhthese u:h shipping per- uh company they are charging I think same (1.2) same as before (0.7) it’s probaly the same (.) let’s see a:h: (1.0) ah-ah- wha:t I can do now for the:: shipment from uh dubai to uh dohah is around (.) u:h forty dollar per:: per ton. (1.0) uh hu(hh.)h: (3.5) :hh but listen the- the very best I can do for the sixteen kilo feta now is one thousand six hundred an’ sixty (3.8) dubai? (0.3) or dohah? dohah (2.0) no we will take dubai one thousand six hundred (1.0) u:h that’s (.) you know uh that’s- that’s not imposs- eller not possible for me because you know there ::hh is the problem with thee u:h (.) minimum prices (.) I Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 154 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 Alan Firth had to uh follow the minimums prices. (0.7) :hh an’ that i:s (.) one thousand six hundred an’ fifty (.) see en e¤ ((CNF)) uh (.) dubai (2.2) .4((keyboard clicking)) (2.2) :hh but listen (.) wha- wha- what would your cost be [from[but uh Mister Mahib does not uh agree (**) (.) he’s uh (.) :hh prefring that u:h hollan is better than u::h (1.8) [because that one is cheaper than you [:hh (1.2) I: see the- an’ the holland is probaly: u:h traditional feta cheese o:r? (3.0) ((Yusuf speaks in Arabic; one other voice can be heard; exchange lasts for 15.5 secs)) uhm (.) feta this u::h same feta (.) :hh but uh Mister Mahib is telling that uh taste same as before your u:h Dennish (0.6) :hh uh Dennish feta. (0.3) before I see (0.5) an’ that uh taste for uh Arabian uh people this (1.5) I see (.) okay Y Y H H Author's Copy Y Y H Y H On the surface, this extract contains numerous examples of what might be called ‘‘L2 learner’’ or ‘‘performance deficiency’’ (Kachru 1992: 62) phenomena: there are several examples of non-standard syntax (e.g., verb omission in line 16: ‘‘your price very high’’, line 35: ‘‘also this truck charges cheaper than before’’, line 37: ‘‘all Kuwaiti truck now this available’’, line 86: ‘‘feta this same feta’’, lines 86–88: ‘‘Mister Mahib is telling that uh taste same as before’’, line 91: ‘‘that taste for Arabian people this’’; word order, line 20: ‘‘that’s why we are taking now this’’, line 22: ‘‘now this three container we brought’’; non-standard verb tense, line 77: ‘‘he’s prefring that hollan is better’’; morphological inflections, line 14 ‘‘three container’’, lines 50–51: ‘‘forty dollar per ton’’, lines 678: ‘‘I had to follow the minimums prices’’, pronouns, line 79: ‘‘that one is cheaper than you’’; omission of article, line 43: ‘‘they are charging I think Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 155 Author's Copy 4. The resourcefulness of ELF interactants This attention to and focus on the ‘‘task-as-target,’’ rather than ‘‘(standard) linguistic-form-as-target’’ can, at times, entail code-switching if this is thought to get the job done. This can be seen in the following extract. Here Ahmed, a Tunisian wholesaler, is speaking on the telephone with Mette, a Danish saleswoman working for a Danish micro-electronic company: (2) SP:TR:16:00:34 1 Ahmed: because I want u:h to time he can go in 2 Tunisian u:h Lagrette uh (***) pas (*) hmm 3 uh .hh hu:h: 4 Mette: yeah 5 Ahmed: tu parles pas francais, toi? Author's Copy Author's Copy same’’), various phonological variants of lexical items that might render the talk as hearably non-standard: ‘‘wery’’ (‘‘very’’, line 7), ‘‘prefring’’ (‘‘preferring’’, line 77), ‘‘probaly’’ (‘‘probably’’, lines 47 and 82), ‘‘Dennish’’ (‘‘Danish’’, line 88) and prosodic contours (that for space limitations will not be reproduced here) that appear to be carried over from the speakers’ L1s (in the case above, Arabic and Danish). And yet, despite all this, the exchange self-evidently ‘‘comes o¤ ’’ as ‘‘routine’’ and ends apparently satisfactorily—the ‘‘problem’’ with the prices of cheese is introduced, explicated, accounted for, embellished, challenged and, subsequently, new prices are o¤ered and a new trading deal is arranged and agreed upon in what appears to be mutually acceptable ways (see also Firth 1995a)—all within one and the same telephone call. In other words, the actual and ‘‘o‰cial’’ trading work gets done, within the call. Thus we see that part and parcel of this trading-by-telephone work entails work of an interactional nature, as the parties skillfully focus on the message substrate of the discourse, rather than attending to syntactic and lexical infelicities or phonological and prosodic anomalies. Such micro-interactional ‘‘work,’’ which calls for ongoing monitoring and adaptation and quintessentially local interpretations, is a critically important component of being a competent trader in these particular ELF encounters. So rather than focusing on or orienting to a particular linguistic or code-related ‘‘target,’’ we can say that the ‘‘target’’ here is completion of the actual unfolding work task, a task that the parties themselves accomplish by providing its interactional structure, its meaningfulness and its consequentiality. Author's Copy 156 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Alan Firth Mette: Ahmed: Mette: Ahmed: Mette: Ahmed: hh(h)h: non. .hh h(h)h: ((smile voice)) ah? no (.) I’m sorry, no no? no u::h i: you want uh if you want uh I speak to: missus Tina? (0.2) yes, ok yes Mette: This extract (2) provides a vivid example of ‘‘multicompetence’’ (Cook 2002) in action, and shows interactants deploying language principally for instrumental ends, where, in this case, a person’s multilingual resources are marshaled in the services of the specific work task. In line 2, Ahmed switches from English to French (it is unclear what appears to trigger the switch, but the clusters of hesitation phenomena in line 2 (‘‘u:h’’, ‘‘uh’’, ‘‘hmm’’) and the sigh-like exhalation on line 3 (uh .hh hu:h:) suggest that Ahmed is experiencing an encoding di‰culty). In line 5 he switches from English to French, and asks, in French, whether Mette speaks French (tu parles pas francais, toi—‘you don’t speak French, you?’). Mette replies in the negative—in French (line 6), with ‘‘non’’, uttered in a clearly discernible ‘‘smile voice’’.2 This reply, in French, is, of course, somewhat ambiguous, as evidenced by Ahmed’s ‘‘ah?’’ in line 7. Mette appears to recognize the ambiguity of replying in French (she is stating, in French, that she does not speak French) and switches to English in line 8, where she produces two emphatic ‘‘nos’’, between which is an apology (‘‘no, I’m sorry, no’’). At this point (line 9) Ahmed switches back to English. Here too, the orientation is to getting the work done with the available—and known-in-common—communicative resources. What is known in common, however, is locally and discursively established, as we see in extract (2). Overwhelmingly, the parties consistently produce interactionally supportive behavior. Given the extent of what some linguists might term ‘‘marked’’ linguistic forms, it is striking how few ‘‘exposed’’ and even ‘‘embedded’’ ‘‘other repairs’’ (Je¤erson 1987) are produced. The overriding impression one gains is that the interactants conjointly focus away from the surface form of language production and focus instead on accomplishing transcendent interpersonal meaning. In the corpus the present author has collected (approximately 280 international business-related telephone calls), this orientation appears to be the interactional modus operandi for these interactants, in this interactional type. By way of an example, consider the following extract (3), and note particularly how Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 157 the interactants are supportive in their sequential contributions. B is an Egyptian cheese wholesaler, A is a Danish cheese producer/seller: (3) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 B: uh (.) I ‘ave asked this uh for one single thing that (.) I want (.) to ‘ave uh an exclusive brand in order to maintain my prize ((price)) (.) in the market, I cannobody can compete (.) with my price, if I will maintain a good price, and the other one has the same brand and the same product (.) he can sell less, and he can just (.) play with the market. (0.3) that’s (.) yeah. the brand, always, which is in the hand of so many people (.) cannot have a good way. no I am uh: (0.5) uh (.) I fully understand your p- point of view because when there is more than one importer of a brand (.) uh there can always (.) be price uh: problems. (0.7) becau:se if one uh is- is holding a big- big stock he will sell at that low price. (0.7) yes (0.5) an’ that’s destroy the brand. an’ that’s why . . . ((continues)) A: B: A: Author's Copy B: A: B: These interactants conjointly produce generally fluent discourse; their turn-taking is orderly, with no overlapping talk and relatively few gaps within and between turns. There are no overt indications of decoding problems, despite the production of language forms that may be viewed (by the interactants themselves) as idiosyncratic or ‘‘non-standard’’ (such as ‘‘the brand, always, which is in the hand of so many people, cannot have a good way’’, lines 10–11, and ‘‘that’s destroy the brand’’, line 21). Once again we see clear evidence of supportive interactional work being undertaken, with feedback produced at finely calibrated junctures—e.g. A’s ‘‘yeah’’ on line 9, following the 0.3 second gap at line 8—where A appears to wait, momentarily, perhaps to ensure B’s extended turn had been completed, and similarly B’s ‘‘yes’’ on line 19, and A’s coda-like ‘‘an that’s destroy the brand’’, line 21, which both displays understanding of and encapsulates B’s point. Note also the more subtle forms of ‘‘work’’ being undertaken here—in B’s reformulation, on lines 10–11, of his own previous point, and A’s embellishment of B’s point, on lines 12–17, and Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 158 Alan Firth Author's Copy 5. Which English? Whose English? A further question to address is: what of the English? What and how we label phenomena is significant, for the terminologies and the labels we deploy are predicated on sets of often hidden assumptions and theoretical dispositions (cf. Potter and Wetherell 1987). The most obvious and immediate label is ‘‘English as a Foreign Language’’ (EFL). But once again, the ideological baggage is unwanted and unwarranted. As I have argued elsewhere (Firth 1990, 1991), ‘‘EFL’’ is too closely allied to the deficientcommunicator mindset characteristic of cognitive, native-speakercentric SLA (Firth and Wagner 1997). Kachru’s (1982) ‘‘Concentric Circles’’ model is important, in that it awakens us to the notion of Englishes, i.e., the possibility of a diversity of legitimate English-language norms and standards. But ‘‘Expanding Circle English’’ does not really fit—it harks back to the inferiority relationship between the ‘‘expanding circle’’ and the inner sanctum of the ‘‘inner circle’’ (Kachru 1982), and besides, in my corpus, are both ‘‘Outer’’ and ‘‘Expanding’’ circle users. Strevens (1980), Quirk (1981) and Greenbaum (1991) broach ‘‘International English,’’ but this is predicated on a notion of standardization and Englishnative-speaker judgements of appropriacy and acceptability. At first blush, the language produced in my data corpus is English ‘‘let loose’’. It is not ‘‘standardized’’ in ways Quirk (1981) and Kachru (1982) would Author's Copy Author's Copy the formulation of the gist of the entire exchange, produced by A on line 21. By producing such forms of talk, the parties here appear to be doing what Falk (1979) termed ‘‘conversational duetting:’’ they are synchronizing not only the timing of their turns at talk, they are also collaborating to produce a coherent message, the ‘‘point’’ of which they co-construct and thus agree upon. Such contributions serve the transcendent goal of jointly accomplishing meaningful, intelligible and convivial processes of interaction, and enable the interactants to demonstrate their expertise, shared values as commodity traders and understanding and knowledge of market and trade behavior. Interactions such as these are complex and skilful accomplishments, crying out for unprejudiced description. That is, descriptions devoid of the linguistic/competency ‘‘deficiency’’ mindset so characteristic of cognitive SLA (for discussions on this, see Rampton 1987; Firth and Wagner 1997, 1998, 2007). Quite clearly, omission of the 3rd person ‘‘s’’ on verbs in the present tense does not prevent five thousands of tons of Danish Blue being shipped to Jakarta and Jeddha on a weekly basis. These language users are, then, just that: language users. Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 159 acknowledge, but would be viewed (by Quirk 1981 and Kachru 1982) as a so-called ‘‘performance variety’’ with variation in form both across and within speakers; thus Kachru (1992: 54): ‘‘[t]he foreign language varieties are performance varieties,’’ where they ‘‘have a highly restricted functional range in specific contexts’’ (Kachru 1992: 55). By comparison, the data in my corpus is a linguistically lawless lingua franca jungle in comparison with the Japanese garden of International English, and ‘‘lawless’’ in the sense that the interactants themselves quite clearly do not attend, in any explicit way, to their own, or the other’s, ‘‘non-standard’’ usage, to disorderly turn transitions and overlaps, and to speech perturbations, and ‘‘lawless’’ in the sense that some interactants display an ability to produce, at di¤erent times, though sometimes during the same interaction, both ‘‘non-standard’’ and ‘‘standard’’ English usage. By way of exemplification, consider the following (extract 4), where Mette, the Danish wholesaler is talking with Natalie, an L1 French customer: (4) SP:TR:13:1:29 1 Natalie: an’ then is er this night uh? 2 (0.3) 3 Mette: yes it’s tonight 4 (0.4) 5 Natalie: it’s tonight 6 (0.2) 7 Natalie: then I- I- I- I can u:hm call the- thee 8 ‘otel 9 (0.2) 10 Mette: can you? Note Natalie’s non-standard ‘‘this night’’ on line 1, and Mette’s response to this on line 3, where she uses the standard form ‘‘tonight,’’ and what appears to be Natalie’s subsequent adoption of Mette’s ‘‘tonight’’ in her own turn on line 5. There is no orientation, on Mette’s part, to ‘‘doing correcting,’’ and on Natalie’s part to having ‘‘learned’’ the standard form, or of having been ‘‘corrected’’ by Mette—despite the fact that Natlie re-uses Mette’s ‘‘tonight’’ in line 5. For example, Mette does not stress the first syllable in the word ‘‘tonight,’’ as a language teacher might feasibly do, when ‘‘correcting’’ an L2 learner’s usage (see, e.g., van Lier 1988). Nor does Natalie, in her subsequent turn (line 5) display any kind of ‘‘change of state token’’ (such as ‘‘ah yes!’’ or ‘‘oh,’’ or ‘‘right!’’, see Heritage 1984b) or ‘‘noticing’’ that she had, in line 1, produced an anomalous, marked, or unidiomatic linguistic form, which had then been indirectly pointed out and/or ‘‘corrected’’ by Mette in line 3. Rather than Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 160 Alan Firth giving the impression that she is retaining her ‘‘own’’ idiolectic form or variety, she elegantly appropriates and incorporates the form provided by Mette into her own turn at turn. Linguistic variability and sharing of linguistic forms thus appear to be part of the ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘routine’’ co-production of meaningful talk-in-interaction. A subtle variant of this is visible in the following extract (5). Here Mette is interacting with Rolf, a Dutch L1 speaker: (5) SP:TR:07:01:33 1 Mette: uhm Thomas is asking where- where he 2 can u:h uh contact you today 3 (0.5) 4 Rolf: ! at my mobile telephone. 5 (0.3) 6 Mette: ! at your mobile telephone. 7 Rolf: ye:s you have my telephone number? 8 Mette: no can I just have that? 9 Rolf: yes Note how Mette, in line 6, incorporates Rolf ’s ‘‘at [pronoun] mobile telephone,’’ produced in line 4. On the day prior to the above recording, Mette had produced the following (pay particular attention to lines 6 and 8): (6) SP:TR:03:02:17 1 Mette: he- he is uh in Berlin until tomorrow 2 evening, Juan 3 (0.4) 4 Juan: ye:s o:: (.) is (.) i-¼ 5 Mette: ¼ but you know, you can- you can just 6 ! call him [(.) ] on his 7 Juan: [ye:s] 8 Mette: mobile phone 9 (0.5) 10 Mette: do you have his number? In this case (extract 6), Mette had produced the form ‘‘on [pronoun] mobile phone’’. This ‘‘on þ [pronoun] þ mobile (tele)phone’’ form conforms to standard English usage, yet, as we see in extract (5), the Danish L1 speaker, Mette, is capable of varying and apparently willing to vary her usage—seemingly in accordance with her interlocutors’ usage. That is, variability appears to be interlocutor dependent. We are, though, led to Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 161 ask why Mette did not adopt Natalie’s ‘‘this night’’ (in extract 4), in parallel with the adoption of Rolf ’s ‘‘at my mobile telephone’’ (in extract 5). A possible explanation may be that there is a level of ambiguity in the form ‘‘this night’’ that is not reached in ‘‘at ! on’’ forms. Thus, we may conjecture that variability of usage is influenced by local needs for interpersonal alignment, accommodation, or attunement with one’s cointeractant (as we see in extract 5) and the need, at certain moments, for disambiguity (which may be critically important in business interactions, where deals may be lost as a result of miscommunications over times and dates). In the cases of extracts (4) and (5), then, the latter need (for disambiguity) appears to prevail over the former (for interpersonal alignment and attunement). Thus, there is evidence of oscillation between standard and nonstandard forms by the same speakers. Is this ‘‘unstable’’ L2 competence, as SLA might have it, or is it perhaps something else, something more subtle—perhaps a kind of dynamic, ‘‘relativized’’ competence, a contingent resourcefulness and co-participant-centered accommodation, alignment and adaptation? The analyst’s expectancy of at least a regularity of non-standard forms has been replaced with repeated observations of linguistic diversity—in one and the same speaker as well as across speakers. Other data will most certainly yield other phenomena, but as far as my data is concerned, non-standard usage is mixed in with standard usage, with hybridizations, with code-switching (to L1, L3, etc.), neologisms, nonce words and lexical borrowing, but in almost all cases such behavior is interactionally and artfully rendered ‘‘non-fatal’’ (Jordan and Fuller 1975) and demonstrably apposite for the purposes at hand. It is this observation of interactional non-fatality that Jordan and Fuller (1975) make, and one that carries no obvious ‘‘deficiency’’ baggage and no associations with ‘‘L2 learnership’’, incompetence, or ‘‘interlanguage,’’ Thus, in that the term ‘‘lingua franca’’ is relatively detached from SLA’s ‘‘nonnative-non-native interactions’’ and ELT’s/SLA’s ‘‘L2 learners’’, deployment of the term lingua franca means that the analyst is better able to bring into the foreground what is observable in the data materials, namely (in the case of my data) agency, situated achievement, creative adaptation of existing resources, relativized communicative competence, inherent heterogeneity and diversity of form, goal-driven work, and, serendipitously, trading behavior. ‘‘LF’’ seems to fit, though not exactly like a kid glove: the term ‘‘lingua franca’’ has no obvious endogenous, emic relevance, in that the interactants themselves are not be likely to refer to their interactions as ‘‘lingua franca’’ encounters, but it suits the current research purposes, despite the irony of English as a Frankish language. Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 162 6. Alan Firth Entailment ELF today is a nascent though rapidly developing field of study, where research would appear to be concentrated in three overlapping areas: (a) language policy and language planning (Wright 2004; Ferguson 2006), (b) language teaching and pedagogy (see, e.g., Jenkins 2006b; Prodromou 2008; and the papers in Rubdy and Saraceni 2006), and (c) microanalyses of naturally occurring ELF interactions (Firth 1990, 1996; Firth forthcoming; Wagner and Firth 1997; Gramkow Andersen 1993, 2000; Meirerkord 1998, 2000; Haegaman 2002; House 2003). Of late, the relationships between ELF and L2 pedagogy and ELT (i.e. [b] above) have occupied the most prominent position in terms of ELF research output. Work with this focus has generated much debate and heated argument, not least in the light of Jenkins’ (2000, 2002, 2003) proposal surrounding what she calls the ‘‘Lingua Franca Core’’ (on this, see, e.g., the recent discussions in Rubdy and Saraceni 2006; Prodromou 2008: 30–32). I would argue that underlying these three areas of research are the interrelated questions of whether ‘‘lingua franca’’ interactions constitute a particular interactional type and linguistic form, i.e. whether there is what I have referred to as a ‘‘lingua franca factor’’. Based on analyses of my own data corpus, which is, of course, a particular interactional type, namely business-related telephone encounters between customers and wholesalers, and based on a review of extant research on ELF interactions, it would appear that what transcends ELF interactions is an inherent variability, both interactionally—as a form of social action—and in terms of linguistic ‘‘form’’, and it is this characteristic that might profitably feed into an embryonic ELF metatheory, leading perhaps to an ELF paradigm. If there is a ‘‘lingua franca factor’’ it resides, I venture, between its variability of form and action, and what ELF entails metatheorically. At the heart of ELF encounters, then, is what appears to be an inherent diversity—of language proficiency, linguistic form, and of sociocultural and pragmatic knowledge. Thus the ‘‘form’’ of English as a lingua franca, as Canagarajah (2007) also argues, is ineluctably emergent, and appears to be negotiated by each set of speakers for their purposes in situ. And this ‘‘in situ,’’ moreover, is itself potentially changeable on a turn-by-turn basis. The implications of this are manifold and important. First, ELF interactants appear to develop competencies that entail monitoring each other’s language proficiency to determine the appropriate grammar, phonology, pace of delivery, lexical range, and pragmatic conventions that ensure locally adequate intelligibility and that also attend to settingspecific tasks—as we saw cursorily in the extracts above. ‘‘Competence’’ Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 163 in ELF interactions, then, entails not so much mastery of a stable and standardized code or form, but mastery of strategies for the accomplishment of accommodation of diverse practices and modes of meaning. Second, it is di‰cult, if not impossible, to describe this ‘‘language’’ a priori, for ELF—as a form of discourse or as a putative variety of English—cannot be characterized outside interactions and speakers in specific social settings. Indeed, even speakers within the same social setting, while engaged in interaction with the same co-interactants, have demonstrated variability of linguistic form—not as a result of ‘‘unstable learning’’— but, arguably at least, as a result of the need to adapt to locally-unfolding interactional exigencies and demands. Hence, as Prodromou (2008: 34) argues, ELF can be seen as ‘‘emergent because ‘its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving’ ’’. Thus, as Meierkord (2004) notes, ELF ‘‘emerges out of and through interaction’’ (emphasis added), and for this reason, she continues, that ‘‘it might well be that ELF never achieves a stable or even standardized form’’ (p. 129). In this view—one which I tentatively espouse, based on the empirical evidence thus far analyzed—ELF does not exist as a ‘‘thing’’ or ‘‘system’’ out there. Instead, as Canagarajah (2007: 926) has it, ‘‘[i]t is constantly brought into being in each context of communication’’. What is appropriate and expedient, then, is contingent, motile, and situationally determined. ELF, as a ‘‘form’’, is thus inherently, chronically, irremediably variable. Third, this notion of variability goes beyond the traditional understanding of variation as deriving from a common core of grammar and language norms. In other words, variation is at the heart of this system, not secondary to a more primary common system of uniform norms. ELF is also inherently hybrid in nature—for example in that parties may borrow, use and re-use each other’s language forms, create nonce words, and switch and mix languages, invoking what Cook (1992) terms ‘‘multicompetencies’’, drawn from their multilingual experiences and practices. Unable to depend on preconstituted form for meaning, ELF participants activate complex pragmatic strategies to help them negotiate their variable form. In the data examined in detail thus far, a kind of suspension of expectations regarding norms appears to be in operation, and a ‘‘working consensus’’ mentioned above is brought into e¤ect. Strategies including ‘‘let it pass’’ and ‘‘make it normal’’, which have been described elsewhere (Firth 1996), appear to be commonly deployed. It is thus not so much uniformity of form, but communicative alignment, adaptation, local accommodation and attunement that would appear to underpin successful lingua franca interactions—at least in the lingua franca encounters thus far described; other types of lingua franca encounters Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 164 Alan Firth Author's Copy 7. Metatheory Over the last decade, concepts, theories and methods in applied linguistics have increasingly been subjected to scrutiny and critique from scholars varyingly influenced by themes in social constructionism and post-structuralism (see, e.g., Block 2003; Firth and Wagner 2007; Kramsch and Whiteside 2007; Rampton 1995, 2006). From these standpoints, established ‘‘truths’’ and ‘‘givens’’ are more accurately conceived as ‘‘contested’’ and ‘‘discursively constructed’’, and viewed as legitimate objects of radical or partial deconstruction. Hence, major theories within applied linguistics—of L2 learning and L2 acquisition, for example—are, in some quarters at least, being revised and redrawn. Socially-oriented methods of analysis are emerging and challenging the more individualistic and cognitivistic methods that have, until recently, dominated the field (Markee and Kasper 2004). Concepts are being challenged and revised. For example, the ‘‘natural’’ ascendancy of the exulted native speaker is being openly questioned, and what were once taken as both established and useful binary oppositional concepts such as competence/parole, speaker/ hearer, L1/L2, acquisition/use, native/non-native, and cognitive/social, Author's Copy Author's Copy are in urgent need of detailed description. An important implication of this is that ‘‘incidental learning’’ is necessarily ongoingly occurring, as parties incessantly monitor and calibrate their speech productions and interpretations to fit the interlocutor. Parties to the ELF thus far examined appear to be cognizant of this, and subtly guide and/or covertly instruct their co-interactants on how to interpret and learn from situated ways of working. It is these ‘‘situated ways of working’’ that produce the ‘‘routine’’ appearance of the lingua franca interactions described here and elsewhere (Firth passim). Whether lingua franca interactions are more or less equally variable in terms of broader interactional patterns, as they are in terms of variability of form, is perhaps a more delicate, and even doubtful, matter. In the encounters thus far studied, the interactants orient to a patterned way of conducting their encounters, where, for example, ‘‘small talk’’ of a delimited kind (in terms of viable topics, for example) precedes ‘‘work talk’’, and where the latter is itself structured in more or less patterned ways. These general interactional patterns have been described in Firth (1995c). To what extent lingua franca encounters become interactionally predictable and systematic, is, as yet, an open question, and research that seeks to uncover and describe patterned interactional behavior in a variety of (regular) lingua franca encounters is clearly urgently required. Author's Copy The lingua franca factor 165 have of late been rejected by a growing number of applied linguists (e.g. Firth and Wagner 1997; Lantolf and Thorne 2006; Leung 2005). Binary oppositions are giving way to hybridities, machinery metaphors (input, output, processing) are nowadays competing with metaphors of ecology (Kramsch 2002) and chaos and complexity (Larsen Freeman 1997, 2007), while distinctions that were once viewed unproblematically as clear-cut are increasingly seen as blurred, liminal, and fluid. It is my contention that on the crest of this social and post-structural wave is work in ELF. A major reason behind this is that inherent in ELF scholarship is a post-structural disposition, which, I would argue, provides a metatheoretical basis for reconfiguring and reconstituting key concepts and assumptions within our field, including, though not limited to, assumptions of an ascendant native speaker, the viability of interlanguage, notions of ‘‘target’’ language and target competence, the nature of learning and being an L2 learner, the prevalence of the view that NNSs are deficient communicators, the assumption that NS communities are the legitimate and exclusive source of norms, the perception of ‘‘nonstandard’’ forms, and more besides. To my mind, scholars of ELF are in a privileged position of being eminently equipped to push and explore the post-structural agenda in applied linguistics, and to further question and, where justified, revise and reconfigure central theories and concepts. Until the early-to-mid-1990s, the research landscape of interaction in ‘‘English as a lingua franca’’ was barren. Here was no luxuriant jungle of empirical findings, no hothouse of theories and concepts. One of the first papers on interaction in English as a ‘‘lingua franca’’ was Firth (1990), where it was argued that the ‘‘lingua franca’’ notion o¤ers new ways of looking at second language discourse. As Seidlhofer (2004) and others have contended, seeing English as a ‘‘lingua franca’’ has profound implications—not least for SLA, but also for (applied) linguistics, sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, and for ELT pedagogy. We are still very much in the midst of our explorations of these implications (see, e.g., the discussions in Rubdy and Saraceni 2006). As Jenkins (2006) points out, viewing English as a ‘‘lingua franca’’, rather than ‘‘non-native speaker’’ or ‘‘learner’’ discourse, o¤ers us an opportunity to question the hegemony of the native speaker and the SLA fixation with ‘‘nativespeaker targets’’, ‘‘interlanguage’’ and normative ‘‘baseline’’ standards. Once these proverbial dominos are pushed, surely it is a question of when and how heavily the others will fall in turn. Here is a chance—a chance that ELF scholars are increasingly exploiting—to question not only SLA’s basic concepts (see Jenkins 2006), but also to question the idea of language as a bounded, unitary ‘‘thing’’ with a fixed code and a transcendent framework of exogenous norms. Here, then, is an opportu- Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 166 Alan Firth nity to question the viability of codified standards, to question the separation of competence and performance, to promote the notion not of homogeneous or even heterogeneous speech communities, but of virtual speech ‘‘communities of the imagination’’, as House (2003) has it; here is an opportunity to question the notion of ‘‘interlanguage’’ with its ‘‘target competence’’ of a native-speakercentric ‘‘standard’’ language. Such questioning, and the answers pursued through ELF scholarship, may turn out to have cataclysmic e¤ects on our community of research. Acknowledgements: This paper was first presented at the 1st International Conference on English as a Lingua Franca, Helsinki, Finland, March, 2008. I am grateful to the conference participants for their thought-provoking comments on the paper, and to two anonymous referees, for their helpful suggestions for improvements. Remaining shortcomings remain my own responsibility. Author's Copy 1. 2. For details on the ELFA corpus, see http:/ /www.eng.helsinki.fi/elfa/research.htm In Firth (2009), I discuss the role of the ‘smile voice’ in lingua franca interactions. References Berns, Margie (1995). English in the European Union. English Today 11(3). 3–11. Block, David (2003). The social turn in SLA. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Canagarajah, Suresh (2007). Lingua franca English, multilingual communities, and language acquisition. Modern Language Journal 91 (Focus Issue): 923–939. Cook, Vivian J. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teacher. TESOL Quarterly 33 (2): 185–209. Cook, Vivian J. (2002). Background to the L2 user. In Portraits of the L2 user, Vivian J. Cook (ed.), 1–28. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Crystal, David (2003). English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Falk, Jane (1979). The duet as a conversational process. 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Varonis, Evangleine M. and Susan M. Gass (1985). Nonnative/nonnative conversations: A model for negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics 6(1): 71–90. Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy Author's Copy 170 Alan Firth Wagner, Johannes and Alan Firth. (1997). Communication strategies at work. In Advances in research on communication strategies, E. Kellerman and G. Kasper (eds.), 323–344. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Sue (2004). Language policy and language planning. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Appendix: Transcription Conventions [ ] (2.5) %% (.) :: "# .,? Left and right brackets indicate beginning and end of overlap. Numbers in parentheses indicate silence by tenths of seconds. Percentage signs encapsulate speech spoken at noticeably slower tempo, relative to preceding and subsequent talk. Micropause (approximately 0.2 seconds). Colons indicate prolongation of the immediately prior sound. The longer the colon row, the longer the prolongation. Arrows indicate shifts into especially high or low pitch. Punctuation markers are used to indicate intonation: , level intonation ; slightly falling intonation . falling intonation to low slightly rising intonation ? rising intonation to high Upper case indicates especially loud sounds relative to the surrounding talk. Degree signs bracketing a sound, word, phrase, etc., indicate especially soft sounds relative to the surrounding talk. A raised dot-prefixed row of h’s indicates an inbreath. Without the dot, the h’s indicate an outbreath. Underlining indicates stressed syllables unintelligible speech; the number of asterisks indicate the number of audible phonemic beats latching between turns or parts of turns ? alan.firth@newcastle.ac.uk Author's Copy WORD  word ·hhh word (***) ¼ Author's Copy Author's Copy ?