HENK00002U English - Free topic 2: World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca

This module consists of two courses – World Englishes: Norms vs. Usages, taught by Henrik Gottlieb, and English as a Lingua Franca, taught by Janus Mortensen and Katherine Kappa.

World Englishes: Norms vs. Usages

English is the mother tongue of almost 500 million people worldwide. Yet an English language council is nowhere to be found: ‘correct English’ is not a fixed entity. How does that affect local norms and conventions as presented by self-established ‘authorities’ like the Oxford or Merriam-Webster dictionaries?

This MA course will focus on the different native-speaker varieties of English and discuss the development over time of what constitutes ‘good English’. We will chart the differences and similarities between English as it appears in (different parts of) the US and the UK, and compare with English as found in Canada or Australia – and in South Africa and other societies where English has official status without being the dominant home language.

Sub-topics to be discussed include the following: Is American English a threat to British English? Is there such a thing as Indian English? Are the different world Englishes moving in different directions, or are they converging? What will happen to English in the EU after Brexit?

We will look for answers to such questions in academic articles plus a host of electronic online text corpora from a number of English-speaking countries.

Links to corpora and articles will be provided during the course, but students need to buy our course book, “World Englishes” by Gunnel Melchers & Philip Shaw (Second edition, Routledge, 2011).

This part of the course will cover the first seven weeks of the semester.

English as a Lingua Franca

When English is used as a means of interaction between speakers with different first languages we say that English is used as a lingua franca. Arguably, this may be the most common way for English to be used worldwide today, and it therefore makes perfect sense that ‘English as a lingua franca’ (or ‘ELF’ for short) in recent years – despite much controversy – has been established as an object of study in its own right, and has recently been added as a core subject in the curriculum for English in the Danish ‘gymnasium’. Through a mix of teacher-led discussions, data sessions and student presentations this course will treat some of the central questions addressed within the area of ELF research: What is English as a lingua franca – and why should we study it? Is ELF a new variety of English? What characterizes the interaction we find in ELF encounters? Is it different from the interaction we find in situations where English is used as a shared first language? Is ELF merely a tool for communication, or is it also a medium that speakers can use to express or establish identity? Does ELF represent a challenge to standard language ideology? And what are the implications of ELF research for language teaching? Since ELF is currently being examined from several different perspectives, the course will introduce students to a range of disciplines and methodologies within the general area of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, conversation analysis and corpus linguistics.

This course will cover the last seven weeks of the semester.