ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have defined lingua franca, its varied roles in historical contexts, its linguistic malleability, and its connection to the evolving world order. We have discussed lingua francas such as Ki-Swahili in East Africa, Pǔtōnghuà in China, and Arabic and English in various parts of the globe. LFs are irretrievably bound up with emergent world orders and are often in the forefront of change. They are in the frontline of exposure to speakers who bring with them a repertoire of both linguistic and nonlinguistic experiences from other languages and cultures. Hence, great phonetic, morphosyntactic, lexical, and discursive diversity characterizes speakers of LF. We began with the hypothesis that in the world orders of families and tribes, humankind spoke thousands of languages. But with the invention of agriculture, language became tied to the land and took on an increasingly regional flavor. As population increased and trade and cities emerged, lingua francas became an indispensable tool connecting diverse peoples and cultures. Some lingua francas grew out of pidgins and creoles as a result of trade and/or colonialization, while others assumed an LF status almost automatically, as they were the languages of huge cities or imperial empires.
All reality, including language, is in a perpetual state of flux and change and everything is related to something else. The spiral/helicoidal model has illustrated the process of linguistic expansion, resistance, negotiation, retreat, and extinction as it relates to the social dynamic of each world order. In each world order are to be discerned forming, norming, and integrating phases. The case studies of Arabia, Singapore, China, and Fujian have also focused on the creative processes that involve the interaction of individual and/or communities in historically determined circumstances. Languages reach an “equilibrium,” and then at liminal periods or “punctuation points,” change accelerates. Where world orders are concerned, a view is presented that the current era witnesses a dramatic and difficult transition from the national to the global.
One of the cherished ideas from the past is that it is contact between societies that has led to increased knowledge, understanding, and 210“progress”—and the durability of this notion is awesome considering the thousands of years of documented evidence showing warfare and disenchantment as a result of contact. The penchant for trade, indispensable without a lingua franca, attests to this truism to this day. Despite the fact that linguistic evolution is often a “zero sum game,” that is, that over time certain languages will take over the function of other languages and send other linguistic companions to atrophy and eventual death; language shift and language death also have many other less controversial benefits.
The helicoidal dimension has hopefully presented applied linguists some intellectual excitement as well as an opportunity to rethink the issue of ELF (English as a lingua franca) in a broader and more integrative perspective. Certainly, the place of ELF cannot be considered without historical consciousness and it is now time for us to examine the place of ELF in the world today a little more closely. There are basically three areas of concern regarding the rise of English as a lingua franca in relation to the global order, and we will group these concerns under the broad areas of (a) language loss, (b) language identity, and (c) language standards and pedagogical implications. The discussion of these three areas concludes with a summative reflection on the politics and place of English as a world language.
