In the midst of a changing language

What happens when a Japanese, a Turk and a Somali communicate with one another in English? Professor Anna Mauranen collected a million-word corpus to find out.

Whether on a tram or out shopping, Professor Anna Mauranen listens to people talking. During a seminar you may see her keenly taking notes. Instead of facts, she jots down interesting words and phrases. “I’m always working, even when I’m not,” Mauranen, a linguistics researcher, admits.

The researcher also kept her ears open one particular spring day fourteen years ago, stopping to listen to two people talking in English at a railway station in Central Finland. The conversation was lively, although English clearly was not the mother tongue of either of the parties.

That same spring, Mauranen began to study the language of international communications, English as a lingua franca.

One in four people speaks English

People have always had a need to communicate with those outside their own language community. However, English is the first genuinely global lingua franca – especially in the worlds of science and business.

It is estimated that 1.5 billion people – a quarter of the world’s total population – speak at least some English. For some 350 million, it is their native language. English has more contacts with other languages than any other language to date.

The more contacts there are, the faster the pace of linguistic change. “For a researcher, this is a fascinating situation. Traditionally, language change has been studied after the fact. Now technology allows us to study how the change progresses.”

Thanks to the development of recording technologies, it is now possible to capture speech in all kinds of situations.

Repetition and dying phrases

Communicating in a foreign language is generally thought to involve a risk of being misunderstood. This is why speakers of lingua franca pay more attention to their speech than usual. Among other things, they use clarifications and rephrasing

When conversing in a language that is foreign to both parties, people aim to find the smallest common denominator. Articles are often omitted, prepositions changed and irregular forms regularised, and unnecessary finesse, such as difficult idioms, is avoided. Not many people understand the phrase You can’t score any brownie points by doing that. But the “chicken and egg” metaphor is known in many cultures.

“Changes in how people communicate are at least as interesting as morphological changes. They offer an explanation and motivation for the development of a language”.

Accent equals skills?

Successful communication does not require perfect language skills. Not even all native speakers are able to inflect the word criterion. But its first two syllables in an appropriate context are sufficient for the purpose of recognising the word.

“In speech, the whole is more important than individual morphological elements. Even best friends who share the same native language cannot understand one another perfectly. However, they usually understand enough.”

In a lingua franca, you need to be able to adapt your speech according to who you are talking to. The British way of speaking will not work in the United States, much less in Zimbabwe.
At school, however, listening comprehension and learning have traditionally focused on native accents.

“Schoolchildren listen to dialogues read from a script by native speakers. Authentic speech, not to mention non-native accents, have been rarely heard – but the situation is now changing rapidly, and in Finland language teachers have been quick to embrace new ideas.”

Indians outnumber Anglo-Americans

If you are not used to hearing different accents, they may come as a shock. Mauranen has heard students criticising an Indian lecturer’s English as being awful. The lecturer had an extensive vocabulary and a good command of grammar – but the accent was far from that of an Anglo-American native speaker.

“There are more people in India who speak English than in the United Kingdom and the United States together,” Mauranen points out, giving a perspective to the situation. “And when visiting London you will hear an enormous variety of native and non-native accents.”

Non-native accents are gradually being included in new learning material. You may now hear an Indian accent on tape – although mostly faked by a professional British actor.

“There’s a conflict of interests. Textbooks and dictionaries are traditionally produced by British publishers. People travel to experience the ‘genuine’ Britain they read about, and the mass of tourists generates a huge cash flow.”
But not everyone is willing to speak according to British or American rules.

Offsprings and furnitures

Speakers of global English continually form new phrases and expressions. Most of these are quickly forgotten, but some become more widespread. In Mauranen’s material, for example, the expression a few words about that has changed to some words about that. So to say is replacing so to speak.

Characteristics that are shared by many different languages also appear in global English. Many non-native speakers use the present perfect a lot, as it is a common tense in their native languages.

Phrases such as “He has come yesterday” or “he lives here since 10 years” may sound odd to a native speaker, but many others find them quite natural.”

Changes in global English inevitably affect even the language spoken by native speakers. The forms offsprings and furnitures are already used by some British people, even though in standard English these words do not take the plural.

Mauranen predicts that English will continue as a global lingua for quite a long time still. “New and rising economic powers may not be happy to shift to the language of one of these countries, which would support the continued use of English.”

It is likely that another language will eventually replace it as the lingua franca. To date, though, it is still spreading and there are no limits in sight. “Everybody wants to speak English, because everyone else does.”

Text: Kati Puhakka
Translation: Language Centre/Language Services, University of Helsinki