Lingua Franca Ideologies

The following is a transcript of parts of an interview of Professor Jennifer Jenkins on the Pearson English podcast.

Interviewer :

Now although estimates vary , it's thought that up to 75% of people using English around the globe are non-native speakers. Now if this is true it means that [the] language is used predominantly as a lingua franca, a common language of people from different countries not to communicate with native speakers. 1:24 - 1:44

Do you think English will always be the lingua franca? It's changed over time, Latin at one point. So what language would you see as becoming the lingua franca of the future? Is it Spanish, Mandarin something else? 16:24 - 16:36

Professor Jenkins :

That's a very interesting question. I would say that for the foreseeable future and certainly in my lifetime but probably quite a long way beyond I would say certainly for 50 years it's going to be English. I don't think it will be Mandarin because the majority of people who speak Mandarin are Chinese. English is different in that it has a spread into every part of the world whereas Chinese speakers are mostly concentrated in certain parts of the world. Even though there are more native speakers of Mandarin than of English that is not particularly relevant. It's how many non-natives there are.

And what's interesting I think as well, is if we look at Europe, and the EU and the fact that the UK has just left the European Union. But it seems to be that they're going to keep English as their working language. English of course will move much further away from native English because your language changes according to your surroundings. So they're only going to have the Irish and the Maltese there in the future. They're not going to have the vast majority of the native English speakers who were there before. But they're going to as I understand it they're going to keep English and I think that in itself is going to influence everybody else to keep English as their working language. And of course it is the working language in ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, they use English as their working language with no problem whatsoever. And it is a kind of neutral language in a sense because they are no native speakers of it.

So I think I would say in answer to your question that yes English will be the global lingua franca for a long time to come. 16:24 - 18:32

The interview starts by claiming a figure of 75% of people using English are non-native speakers. This percentage estimate is made from estimates of the number of native vs non-native speakers of English, typical figures give 335 million for native and 1,500 million for non-native (Ethnologue, 2015 as quoted in Moran Panero, 2018). The problems of how to demarcate native/non-native, how to define what "using English" means, the reliance of estimates on school attendance records and the issue of enumerating languages, amongst others, all lead to undermining the notion that these statistics make any sense. So consequently the promotion of such enumeration leads us to ask questions about underlying language ideologies.

The paragraph from the recording where Jenkins compares English and Mandarin recalls the statement of Pennycook (2012) namely:

"Common truisms about English as the most widely spoken lingua franca and Chinese as the most widely spoken mother tongue stand on very thin ground indeed" (Pennycook, 2012:150).

Pennycook argues that the attitudes to questions such as lingua francas:

"are not in the end answerable as linguistic questions but are in fact deeply ideological concerns" (Pennycook, 2012:150),

where Pennycook defines language ideology, quoting Sergeant (2009), as the "structured and consequential ways in which we think about language" (Pennycook, 2012:138). Pennycook points to the irony of using the number of non-native speakers of English to distinguish it from the number of native users of Chinese, namely that many ELF researchers question the use of native/non-native labels when used in analysing English. Furthermore it is equally valid and arguable to view Chinese as a lingua franca spoken in an area making up about a quarter of the people in the world.

The paragraph where Jenkins seems to equate what is happening in Europe and ASEAN countries seems to involve a confusion about what is a working language. In Europe, English is one of 24 working/official languages, and one of three procedural languages (the others being French and German). While in ASEAN countries it is true that English is the sole working/official language, the description of English as a "kind of neutral language" omits the class effects of the use of English in ASEAN countries, namely that minority language speakers with differing class statuses may be less likely to use English. Further, Pennycook (2012) points out, the likelihood of people using English in Europe knowing each others' languages or similar languages is large e.g. Romance language family. Whilst there may be some similarities of languages in ASEAN countries the variance is much greater than for languages in Europe.

One last point, in answer to what model to teach to learners Jenkins says a single model can be used and the learner can use it as they want "as long as the learner is making him or herself understood". This is often termed the mutual intelligibility criterion which comes from the work on demarcating dialects in the Western tradition. By contrast the Chinese tradition, reports Dong (2010), as quoted by Pennycook (2012), uses "common orthography, shared literature, historical roots, cultural heritage, and political unity" as the criteria when labelling a dialect or language.

References

Moran Panero, S. (2018) "Global languages and lingua franca communication." In Jenkins, J., Baker,. W., & Dewey, M. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca (pp. 556-569) Oxford: Routledge.

Pennycook, A. (2012). Lingua francas as language ideologies. In Kirkpatrick, A. & Sussex, R. (Eds.) English as an international language in Asia: Implications for language education (pp. 137-154). Dordrecht: Springer.