Abstract
While monolingual Standard English ideologies circulate in Japanese and other societies (Yano, this volume), how is this idealised English theoretically related to global communication? The answer to this question would be key for the real-world applications of ELF studies, including pedagogy. The present chapter seeks to identify the role of monolingual Standard English, however it is defined, in today’s ubiquitous multilingual scenarios with English. For this purpose, the chapter first problematises the ideological nature of English as a monolithic construct and then offers current thinking in the field of ELF, namely the theory of English as a Multilingua Franca (Jenkins in Engl Pract 2:49–85, 2015), which arguably subsumes those of transculturality (Baker, 2018) and transmodalities (Hawkins in Appl Linguist 39:55–77, 2018a). After re-examining the above construct and theories through the meta-lens of complexity theory (Larsen-Freeman, 2018), the chapter finally identifies the important but limited place of monolingual Standard English for English users in this twenty-first century.
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24 March 2020
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in Hülmbauer’s (2013, p. 64) extract, German, Italian, and Greek speakers use the word card to mean “map”. This word is the “false friend” of Karte, carta, and χάρτης/chártis (all meaning “map”) in their respective strongest languages. For another example, the academic discourse of an Arabic-French-English trilingual student in Mullin, Haviland, and Zenger (2014) may be structured flourishingly in English. As the student puts it, this is because “Arabic and French are [generally] elaborate” (p. 158).
- 2.
One instance that can be seen as multilanguaging is available in Cogo and Dewey (2012, p. 131). During conversation with a Japanese colleague, an Italian teacher uses the expression step on the stones to make a joke. She does not know this expression until the Japanese teacher utters it to mean that carelessness will lead to failure, presumably drawing on (石に)躓く/(ishi-ni-)tsumazuku in Japanese.
- 3.
Likewise, Baker (2018) introduces Chittima Sangiamchit’s Facebook data, in which Thai and Chinese students at a British university discuss mooncake and the mid-autumn festival while calling their senior international colleagues with the title of พ่ี/‘P’ (“older sibling” in Thai). This example shows that both terms of address and the reference to traditional events may be linked to different places and spaces within a few message exchanges.
- 4.
One example from Hawkins (2018b) is video footage of Ugandan students showing their life, including the chore of fetching water. To the Ugandans’ surprise, Barcelonese student viewers take notice of the skills to carry a water bucket on the head and play with bottled water in their response video. As may be obvious, the perceived importance of water is remarkably different between the two groups.
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Acknowledgements
This work is part of the project supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up No. 18H05585.
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Ishikawa, T. (2020). Complexity of English as a Multilingua Franca: Place of Monolingual Standard English. In: Konakahara, M., Tsuchiya, K. (eds) English as a Lingua Franca in Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33288-4_5
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