Editorial
An edited version of this article was published in Voices, January-February 2008.

English as a Lingua Franca

Monica Hoogstad, UK

Monica is a Business English teacher and a Teacher Trainer with twenty years experience in ELT. She runs The English Channel, a language institute specialising in organising and conducting bespoke in-company business communications training programmes and teacher development courses. E-mail: MonicaHoogstad@yahoo.co.uk

The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur’.

George W. Bush, in a conversation with Tony Blair

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Introduction
Background
Activities
References

Introduction

One of the hottest and most passionately debated topics today is undoubtedly the McDonaldisation of the world. Lingua franca of the global village, English is perceived as an aid to progress, democracy and modernity by some, and as a hegemonic and colonial agent by others. Greek, Latin and French preceded English as international languages. However, none of them managed to reach so far and to be pervasive in so many aspects of people’s daily life. And none of them generated such outright associations with an Armageddon scenario, where ‘threatening superpower’, ‘linguistic imperialism’, ‘perfidious plot’ and ‘killer language’ are the key-words. Statistics actually support this school of thought, indicating that the Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans, while the French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. Furthermore, the Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans, while the Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The conclusion’s a no-brainer: eat and drink what you like; it’s speaking English that kills you.

Background

In his Letter to Congress in 1780, John Adams, the second US president, made a visionary statement, foreseeing that “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age.” Needless to say, he was spot on. However, despite spending huge amounts of money on learning and improving English – a pivotal tool for global communication in business, politics, science, technology, etc. – lots of countries regard it as a Damocles sword, that will sooner or later destroy their cultural identity and displace the vernacular.

While I agree that loans from English are triggering lexical transformations in many languages, I’d suggest postponing casting stones at Anglo-Saxonisation and taking a closer look at the history of the English language; it might turn out to be both instructive and reassuring. At the moment, English boasts a vast vocabulary that surpasses all other European languages, and it certainly owes its richness to its unrivalled propensity to assimilate, absorb and adapt. What we call English nowadays timidly started as a juxtaposition of a few tribal Germanic dialects with a mere one hundred and fifty thousand speakers. Before evolving into the language spoken by one and a half billion people, it sailed the seven seas, it evaded extinction, it survived suppression, it withstood rivalries for political and religious power, and it kept adding layers upon layers of foreign borrowings from friends and foes alike. Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Norman/French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and many other influences didn’t have a lethal effect on English. On the contrary, they crystallised in a cornucopia of words, expressions, meanings, synonyms and nuances. A lingua franca helps the world to interconnect, therefore individuals and cultures needn’t regard it as a linguistic and cultural Trojan Horse.

Activity 1a is an eye-opener for those students who fear that globalisation and implicitly English smother their cultural identity and endanger their native tongue. Gaining deeper insight into the history of English and into the processes a language undergoes throughout its evolution might urge them to revise and hopefully even reverse their resentment. Activity 1b develops team spirit and relies on the power of narrative while putting tired vocabulary into a completely new perspective.

Activities

Activity 1a

On the surface, this activity attempts to brush up the students’ debating skills, but its deeper purpose is to widen their inter-language and intercultural awareness.

• Announce you’re going to play a game involving debating skills.
• Get the group to split into two teams that are going to compete against each other.
• Give each team a list of thirty words and ask them to ascertain what they have in common.
• Make sure the students have access to a good monolingual dictionary and a dictionary of word origins, and be prepared to assist with explanations and suggestions wherever necessary.

Team A’s list:

• agony, alphabet, barbaric, economy, hypocrite, politics, skeleton, synergy, telephone, zoo;
• army, battle, budget, guarantee, justice, marriage, regard, river, sausage, vision;
• alcohol, algebra, assassin, coffee, hazard, magazine, mattress, sofa, syrup, tariff.

Team B’s list:

• album, altar, ambition, cancel, candidate, premium, road, salary, virus, wall;
• balcony, cartoon, design, disaster, influenza, miniature, nepotism, quarantine, plaza, salami;
• boss, coleslaw, cruise, easel, filibuster, korfball, landscape, reef, smuggle, yacht.
• After the teams have established that origin is the common streak in each ten-word cluster (i.e., Greek, French and Arabic for Team A; Latin, Italian and Dutch for Team B), start an open debate around the question “Does English pose a threat to other languages?”
• To make the discussion more vivid, ask each team to choose a clear position: in favour or against the proposed statement. Allocate ten minutes, in which the teams prepare their arguments, and a further ten, when they present their ideas and debate them. May the best team win!

Activity 1b

This is a vocabulary recycling activity that takes the words encountered in Activity 1a to a further level.

• Announce you’re going to play a game involving speaking skills and creative thinking.
• The object of the game for each team is to choose one word chain and to make up a coherent story containing all ten words and preserving the original sequence of the words.
• Each story can be kept within one team or, to increase the fun factor, a member of Team A starts with one sentence containing the first word. Then she nominates a member of Team B to continue the story, by adding the next sentence containing the second word, etc.
• Grant bonus points to the students who manage to add elements of drama and/or humour to the story, who use the words in idioms and (semi) fixed expressions, and who embellish their predecessor’s narrative.
• The team that tot up the highest number of points are the winners.

Although it may look now like it’s game, set and match to English, it won’t hurt anyone to buy a ‘Mandarin for Dummies’ self-help book. Just in case.

References

Bragg, M., 2004, The Adventure of English. The Biography of a language, London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Flavell, L., Flavell, R., 2000, Dictionary of Word Origins, London: Kyle Cathie Ltd.

Sweeney, S., 2006, The Culture of International English, English Teaching professional, issue 47.

Zughoul, M. R., 2003, Globalization and the EFL/ESL Pedagogy in the Arab World, Journal of Language and Learning, no. 2.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.