Diversity of users, settings, and practices: how are features selected into ELF practice?

Abstract

AbstractThis article describes naturally occurring interactions drawn from three disparate English as a lingua franca (ELF) settings, all in Japan but involving diverse multinational groups of users, each bringing with them repertoires of experiences, skills, strategies, and linguistic features. Adaptations were observed in the language practices, including well-attested strategies and non-selections, but also distinct and hybridised patterns (e.g. question–response exchanges, address-reference forms). Although these features can be explained in terms of the improvisational stances of the users, in light of the wide disparities in proficiency, strategies, degrees of success, and of the hybrid forms that came to be locally preferred, a more satisfactory explanatory framework was sought in the broader study of historical language contact and change, especially in Mufwene’s recent re-interpretation of creoles as situated cases of language restructuring. The observed ELF practices are explained as the result of cooperative restructuring, by means of fitness-based selections from the feature pool, or virtual capacity, fed by the diverse repertoires of the participants. Such an approach foregrounds functional interpretations of ELF, and creates an inclusive framework wherein the variables that define different contact situations can be discerned.