Let's 'chew the fat' in ELF!

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is the English used by people who have different native languages and use English as a language of communication. It provides rich ground for research as its users are multilingual and are able to call on many different languages as they converse.

Marie-LuisePitzl decided to focus on the use of idioms in ELF. These are metaphorical phrases (e.g., too many cooks spoil the broth) which can’t be directly translated into other languages and keep the same meaning. She found that there are two main ways that idioms manifest themselves. Sometimes they seeped into conversation, without speakers or listeners being aware of them. At other times, however, they were explicitly mentioned by speakers; for example, at times a foreign idiom was directly translated into English and at others, the speaker used the language of the idiom to say it.

An example of the first type is don’t praise the day yet, said by a Polish speaker when in conversation with German speakers. It probably draws on the Polish expression Nie chwal dnia przed zachodem słońca ‘Don’t praise the day before the sunset’. As this saying is virtually identical in meaning to the German phrase: Du sollst den Tag nicht vor dem Abend loben ‘you should not praise the day before the evening’, it becomes part of a multilingual idiom ‘pool’ shared by German and Polish speakers via ELF. The participants in the conversation understand these ‘translated’ idioms even if they don’t have equivalents in English.

An example of when the idiom is explicitly discussed is in the following conversation involving Maltese, Serbian and Norwegian speakers:

Speaker (Serbian): “the point of the whole things about quotas it’s a very good idea but in the same time it’s … how to say it in English like knife with double blade?”

The speaker draws attention to the idiom immediately by introducing it with how to say it in English…, the pronoun it suggesting that she’s thinking of an idiom in her own language. Indeed, both German, Serbian and English have similar idioms (in English a double-edged sword) to express something that has both advantages and disadvantages. The speakers don’t worry about the accuracy in English and show no insecurity about using this un-English version in their multilingual context.

Sometimes Pitzl found idioms being used in their original language within ELF conversations. In the following example, Maltese and Serbian speakers discuss their different cultures, specifically smoking habits. The Serbian speaker says that Serbians smoke a lot and comments, ...we have a proverb like Italians...fuma come un turco (= smoke like a Turk). It is interesting that the language the speaker chooses for the idiom is not her own or her Maltese listeners’, but Italian. Through this choice, she communicates not only that she is multilingual but also that she’s aware that her listeners know Italian (Maltese contains about 50% vocabulary of Italian origin), signalling her closeness to her listeners and drawing on their multilingualism.

So, ELF is incredibly creative and tolerant; there’s no need to mind one’s, how do you say it, “Qs and Ps”?

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Pitzl, Marie-Louise (2016). World Englishes and creative idioms in English as a lingua franca. World Englishes 35(2):293-309.

doi. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.qmul.ac.uk/10.1111/weng.12196



This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Do children hearing two languages acquire language at a slower rate?

It is often assumed that children who are exposed to two languages from birth will acquire language at a slower rate compared to children who only hear one language. But is there any evidence to confirm that this is actually the case?

Annick de Houwer, Marc Bornstein and Diane Putnick have investigated this topic and have compared the comprehension and production vocabularies of bilingual and monolingual children in their second year of life. They collected data for 31 middle-class bilingual children with Dutch and French input from birth and 30 children from similar backgrounds with only Dutch input from birth. In the bilingual families, all but one family reported that they used the “one person, one language” principle of speaking to the child and that this language pattern started from birth. In 14 of the bilingual families, the mothers spoke Dutch and the fathers spoke French to the child and in 16 families, the mothers spoke French and the fathers spoke Dutch to the child; in all cases both parents knew Dutch and French. Children in the monolingual group heard just Dutch, spoken to them by their parents and other caregivers from birth.  The children were studied at ages 13 months and again at 20 months using research methods that allowed the researchers to examine the children’s vocabulary sizes for both word comprehension and word production.

The comprehension results showed that at 13 months old, the bilingual infants understood as many Dutch words as the monolingual infants. However, the overall word comprehension for the bilinguals (i.e. Dutch and French combined) showed that, on average, the bilinguals understood 71% more words than the monolinguals, a significant difference. At age 20 months, the children were only compared for their Dutch comprehension and the results showed that the monolingual children understood similar numbers of Dutch words as the bilingual children.

As one might expect, the number of words actually produced at age 13 months was low for both the monolingual and bilingual children but nevertheless the number was similar for each group, regardless of whether the words were Dutch only or whether they were French and Dutch combined. The researchers also point out that there was a lot of variation between the individual children in the number of words that each child could produce. When the researchers compared the children at 20 months, they again found that, on average, the bilinguals produced similar numbers of words as the monolinguals, although again there was a great of interindividual variation.

In sum, these separate measures of comprehension and production show that there were no bilingual-monolingual differences for Dutch at ages 13 or 20 months. There was, however, one difference; when the bilinguals’ languages were combined at 13 months, the bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals in terms of word comprehension. The results of the study support the researchers' conclusions that exposing children to two languages from birth does not slow down lexical development. Some of the bilingual children in their study understood and produced more words than some of the best performing monolinguals. The researchers argue that if a bilingual child is showing signs of slow lexical development then parents and speech professionals should try to understand what is causing the delay rather than attribute it to bilingualism.

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Houwer, A., Bornstein, M. and Putnick, D. (2013). A bilingual-monolingual comparison of young children’s vocabulary size: Evidence from comprehension and production. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1-23.

Doi: 10.1017/S0142716412000744

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Switching languages = switching personalities?

Multilinguals often report feeling different depending on which language they are speaking.  Learning to operate in a second or foreign language seems to have the ability to affect the behaviour of the individual, suggesting that learning a new language is not just about learning words and grammar, but also about learning to behave in a completely new way.

Jean-Marc Dewaele and Seiji Nakano were keen to explore this idea. They questioned 106 multilingual students from Birkbeck College in London, who spoke a total of 56 different languages between them.  Dewaele and Nakano asked the participants to complete an online questionnaire comprising five questions about each of the different languages that they spoke:

1)    How logical do you feel in this language?

2)    How serious do you feel in this language/

3)    How emotional do you feel in this language?

4)    How fake (not yourself) do you feel in this language?

5)    How different do you feel in this language?

The participants were asked to respond on a scale of 1 = feel the same, to 5 = feel very different (if answering question number 5 for example).  These closed questions were followed up with more open questions building on their responses.

Overall, the participants reported feeling significantly less logical, less emotional and marginally less serious in languages that they had acquired later in life, whilst also feeling significantly more fake and different in these languages.  Results for questions 4 and 5 were interesting as they seemed to suggest that participants felt the greatest difference and ‘fakeness’ when moving between their first (L1) and second (L2) languages.  Although they felt just as different speaking L3 and L4 as they did speaking L2, the shift in feeling was no greater than moving from L1 to L2.  The researchers speculated that this may be due to the fact that L3 and L4 are used more infrequently and are not mastered well enough to experience such a difference when switching to them. 

It was interesting to see that most participants reported feeling more authentic, more logical, more emotional and more serious in languages that they had acquired earlier in life compared to those acquired later.  It seems that maybe multi-linguals feel more restricted in these later languages.  These findings correspond to a well-known phenomenon in acquiring a second language, which suggests that those learning and using a L2 are unable to vary their speech styles  between formal and informal as well as they are able to in their L1.  In fact, speakers tend to be ‘stuck’ in the middle of the formal-informal continuum in their L2, whilst they can function over its whole range in their L1.

The multilinguals in Dewaele and Nakano’s study also reported feeling more colourful, rich, poetic and emotional if they switched to using a language which they perceived to be more colourful, rich, poetic and emotional.  For example, one participant observed:

Speaking in my L1 is like being in my own skin – a completely natural and comfortable feeling.  Using my L2 is perhaps like wearing gorgeous clothes and evening make-up – a not completely natural state of affairs but one which allows me to shine and appear ‘beautiful’.

Many of the participants who reported feeling like this tended to also report a change in context when switching languages and it could be this change in context and environment which causes a change in feeling, rather than the actual switch in language itself.  In a community of bilinguals who often switch between their two languages these feelings of difference would be minimal as the context remains unchanged.   

In fact, this area appears to be very complex and the only things Dewaele and Nakano were able to establish for certain is that multi-linguals often feel different when switching between languages and that how they feel about operating in their different languages does depend on the age that the language was acquired.  However, they concluded that a lot of this difference remains unexplained and that this is possibly due to the fact that language is so bound up with various contextual and environmental factors.

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Dewaele, Jean-Marc and Nakano, Seiji (2013) Multilinguals’ perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34: 107-120.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2012.712133

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Growing up bilingually

one language or two: does it make a difference?

Do bilingual children develop language more slowly than children acquiring only one language? This is the question that a team of researchers from Florida Atlantic University set out to answer.

Erika Hoff and her colleagues measured the language skills of 103 children, both boys and girls, when they were aged 1 year and 10 months, 2 years and 1 month, and finally at the age of 2 years and 6 months. 47 children were bilingual, acquiring both Spanish and English, and 56 were monolingual, acquiring only English. All the children were from families with a high socioeconomic status.

Overall, the English language skills of the monolingual English-learning children were more advanced and improved more rapidly during this period than the English language skills of the bilingual children, though in all cases the scores were within the normal range of variation for monolingual children. The bilingual children lagged behind the monolingual children by about three months.

Importantly, though, this was only the case when the children’s skills in English were measured. When both English and Spanish words were included, the total vocabulary size for the bilingual children was no different from that of the monolingual children.

In other words, the bilingually developing children were learning words at the same rate as monolingual children, but their word learning was, like their language exposure, divided between two languages. Previous research had also shown that the size of a child’s vocabulary depended on the amount and type of language to which they were exposed, but what was new about this study was that similar results were obtained for grammar. Measurements of the grammatical complexity of the children’s speech, such as whether they produced combinations of words rather than single word utterances, also showed that the bilingual children lagged behind the monolingual children, but only when their skills in English were tested – not when their abilities in both English and Spanish were taken into account. As the researchers point out, this contradicts the idea that children’s vocabulary depends on what they hear, whereas children’s grammar develops as their cognitive processes become more mature. The findings suggest, instead, a link between vocabulary and grammar that could be either direct or indirect.

An important further finding was that the pace of language development reflected the amount of exposure to the two languages. The researchers divided the bilingual children into three groups: those who heard Spanish more often than English, those who heard English more often, and those whose exposure to the two languages was roughly equal. The size of the difference in the language skills of the monolingual and the bilingual children depended on the extent of the bilingual children’s exposure to each of their two languages. Thus, across all measures of English language skills, the bilingual children who heard English more often than Spanish scored most like the monolingual English-speaking children, followed by the balanced bilingual children (those who heard English and Spanish more or less equally).

The researchers point out that their findings have implications for education, as bilingual children may be more cognitively able than their scores indicate if they are tested in only one of their languages. Skill level in a single language, in other words, is not the same indicator of ability for bilingual children as it is for monolingual children.

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Hoff, Erika, Core, Cynthia, Place, Silvia, Rumiche, Rosario, Señor, Melissa and Parra, Marisol (2012). Dual language exposure and earlybilingual development. Journal of Child Language 39: 1-27.

doi:10.1017/S0305000910000759

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Fitting in to a new home – with a Bri’ish accent?

Whose English accent will this little girl grow up to use? Her parents’, or her local friends'?

It’s often thought that as they grow up, the children of immigrants begin to sound like their locally-born friends rather than their parents. Devyani Sharma and Lavanya Sankaran, though, found that things are more complex than this – language change between different generations is more gradual than might be expected, and it’s also more complex.

Sharma and Sankaran worked in the Punjabi community in Southall, London, where, over the course of the last 60 years, South Asians have shifted from being a minority group to a majority one which now makes up more than 60 per cent of the local population. The researchers analysed the English of three groups of South Asians, totalling 42 individuals. One group consisted of first generation immigrants who had migrated from India as adults, and the two other groups were locally-born second generation South Asians, one older (aged between 35 and 60) and one younger (aged between 18 and 35). The older second generation group had grown up in Southall at a time when South Asians were still a minority group there and when race relations in the area were hostile. By the time the second, younger, group (aged 18-35) was growing up, South Asians were no longer such a minority in Southall and, perhaps as a result, race relations had shifted to a cooperative coexistence. 

The researchers focussed on the pronunciation of /t/, which has a distinctive local pronunciation as well as a South Asian pronunciation. The local London pronunciation of /t/ is glottalised (with the pronunciation of words like water or feet sometimes represented in popular writing as wa’er and fee’). As you might expect, the first generation South Asian speakers had almost no glottalised pronunciations of /t/. By contrast, both second generation groups used glottalised /t/; furthermore, they followed the same pattern, using this pronunciation more often at the end of a word than the middle of a word (so, more often in feet than water). In their use of glottalised /t/, then, the second generation were speaking more like locally-born people of their age than their parents – just as we might expect.

However, the South Asian speakers sometimes pronounced /t/ as a retracted or retroflex consonant, as in Punjabi, the Indian language that they also spoke. Here the tip of the tongue is curled back to touch the ridge just behind the top teeth (or close to the ridge). You can hear this pronunciation in the stereotyped English of Apu, the Indian immigrant in The Simpsons. The first generation immigrant group used retroflex /t/ 35 per cent of the time. The second generation groups also used this pronunciation, albeit less often: 16 per cent of the /t/’s in the English of the older second generation were retroflex, and 8 per cent in the English of the younger speakers. The second generation, then, had not altogether abandoned the pronunciation of their parents: although language change was taking place across the generations in these immigrant families, it was a more gradual process than is often supposed.

The change was also more complex than expected. Unlike both their parents and the older second generation group, the younger speakers used retroflex /t/ more often at the beginning of a word, where it is more noticeable (for example, in tea or toffee). They also pronounced it with a “fortis” (more energetic) phonetic quality.

In interviews with the researchers younger second generation male speakers used retroflex /t/ more often than younger female speakers Even here, though, the picture is more complicated than this gender difference suggests. Female speakers used a surprisingly high number of pronunciation features influenced by Punjabi, including retroflex /t/, when they were speaking English at home. For female speakers, then, there seems to be a sharper compartmentalisation of styles across their repertoire.

Sharma and Sankaran point out that other pronunciation features pattern in a similar way in the English of these three groups of speakers. They explain that for the older second generation group, surviving at school and in public meant they had to downplay Indianness and pass as British, so they acquired local pronunciations and weakened their use of South Asian ones. Many individuals in this group then went into their fathers’ businesses and had continuing ties with India. Depending on where they were and who they were talking to, they needed to signal that they belonged either to a British or an Indian group. As a result, they were able to control two distinct pronunciations of English. The younger generation not only had less regular contact with India, but by the time they were growing up race relations in the area were less hostile, so they did not need to try to pass as British. Instead, using a focused, Punjabi-inflected speech style allows them to signal their allegiance to the now sizeable local British Asian community.

Sharma and Sankaran note that in immigrant communities elsewhere – in North America, for example – there may be more rapid assimilation to local patterns of pronunciation since, as they have shown, linguistic assimilation depends in part on social factors such as community relations and the size of the migrant community.  

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Devyani Sharma and Lavanya Sankaran (2011) Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in London South Asian speech. Language Variation and Change 23: 399-428.

doi: 10.1017/S0954394511000159

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Welsh and English in Wales

No excuses for not paying!

Language policy and planning initiatives devoted to the revival of the use of Welsh in Wales appear to have been successful in halting the decline of the language. In fact, census data in 2001 showed that the use of the Welsh language among speakers had increased by an impressive 1.8% in the previous decade. Coinciding with this increase has been an increase in the public visibility of Welsh and English bilingualism, for example in road signs and public notices and on more personal items such as T-shirts. Is this increased visibility of bilingualism simply an index of the revival efforts? Researcher Nik Coupland says that ‘this is too sparse an account’ and argues that there is a wide range of social forces that impact on language display in Wales.

Coupland has looked at a range of images that are currently on display in Wales and suggests that they can be ‘framed’ in five different ways. The first two are indicative of the way that visible bilingualism in Welsh has been institutionally promoted in Wales. The other three frames tend to reflect the context in which Welsh is being used and, to an extent, the attitudes of those displaying the images.

Nonautonomous Welsh refers to the display of Welsh throughout most of the 20^th Century, when Welsh was either considered to be inappropriate for use as a public code or it was heavily anglicized, particularly along the Welsh/English border. Examples are street names, which clearly draw on Welsh but which use English orthography followed by the English word street or road e.g. Danycoed Road. In this frame, then, Welsh can be seen to be ‘delegitimized and publicly subordinated to English’.

Parallel-text bilingualism describes the dominant pattern of bilingual signage over the last two decades and which promotes Welsh and English as being on an equal footing, as in the car park image above. In this case the sign has Welsh first, common in areas where there is a high proportion of bilingual speakers, but in areas where there are fewer bilingual speakers the signs are often English first. It is noteworthy, though, that an equal amount of visual space is given to both languages. These parallel-text displays reflect the current language policy of Wales.

The third frame is what Coupland calls The frame of National Resistance and links to images which are displays of language activism in Wales and tend to promote the idea that Welsh is under threat, primarily from English. One example given is a caravan parked in a field with the slogan ‘SPEAK OUR LANGUAGE!’ painted on its side, which clearly speaks to potential English-speaking incomers to the area. These activist images are perhaps seen more in northwest Wales in the denser Welsh-speaking areas. 

The fourth frame, Welsh exoticism, looks at images which promote Welsh as what Coupland calls a ‘consumable cultural curiosity’ and which are generally embedded within the promotion of Welsh in the tourist industry. The most obvious example is the name of the town Llanfairpwllgwyngychgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch  which is displayed, along with a syllable-by syllable guide to its pronunciation, at the town’s railway station. The town is conventionally known as LlanfairPG or Llanfairpwll but here the sign promotes Welsh as being exotic, a language that cannot be pronounced without assistance.

In the final frame of Laconic Metacultural Celebration Coupland looks at the way that language display can be a ‘personalized and personalizing practice’. He discusses the way that a small commercial company in north Wales projects Welsh language and culture onto T-shirt and sweatshirt images. One example, for instance, promotes the historic value of Welsh by parodying a well-known beer-advertising slogan: the T-shirt text reads Cymraeg (meaning Welsh) with the subscript Probably the oldest living language in Europe. Other texts allude to Welsh historical events or cultural phenomena; the use of 62 on a T-shirt for instance is a reference to an important year, 1962, in the revitalization of Welsh and the year that the Welsh Language Society was formed. The slogans invite the reader to puzzle over and work out the references for themselves but, as Coupland points out, they are all celebratory.

Coupland concludes by highlighting that institutions are not the only agents in the process of imprinting language ideologies on public spaces; individuals and small companies can also contribute to the linguistic landscape. The different frames of language display show that ‘there are competing ways of visualizing what “being bilingual” actually means’.

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Coupland, Nikolas. (2012). Bilingualism on Display: The framing of Welsh and English in Welsh public spaces. Language in Society 41, 1-27.

doi: 10.1017/S0047404511000893

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Language brokering: good or bad?



 In recently arrived immigrant families, young people often act as language brokers for their parents

Eduardo the language broker

Eduardo is 14 years old. He speaks English and Portuguese. Eduardo’s mum can’t speak English, so she often asks him to help her. Eduardo is proud and pleased to help his mum but he is embarrassed when he translates for her at the doctors. Eduardo misses school some days because his mum needs him to translate for her.

It is sometimes thought that this kind of translating and interpreting activity (‘language brokering’) imposes too great a burden of responsibility on young people like Eduardo, especially as it often involves explaining cultural differences rather than simply translating word for word from one language to another. However, a recent study gives a more positive account of language brokering.

Tony Cline and his colleagues asked 37 young people aged between 15 and 18 to comment on the story vignette about Eduardo, as part of a larger study about young people’s perceptions of conflicting roles. 16 of the young people lived in monolingual white British families and 21 lived in bilingual families. 11 of the bilinguals had been involved in language brokering themselves, while the remaining 10 had no personal experience of language brokering. The main aims of the study were, firstly, to see whether young people with differing personal experiences of bilingualism had different views about language brokering and, secondly, to see what differences there might be between young people in multilingual areas in their understanding of the development of relationships between children and parents during adolescence.

The 37 young people were first asked what they thought about Eduardo as a person and about his feelings. Their views of him as a person were almost all positive. They described him, for example, as cool, noble, helpful and nice. Some of the monolinguals, especially, were impressed by his language skills. Fewer young people commented on his feelings, but when they did, they mainly focussed on the mention of embarrassment. Some empathised with him, some said there was no need to feel embarrassed, and some suggested reasons for his embarrassment. Those with no experience of language brokering thought he might feel demeaned by his mother’s lack of English, but those with experience of this kind of situation suggested more searching reasons, such as feeling awkward about invading his mother’s privacy or being embarrassed at not being able to translate complicated vocabulary.

A second question asked about Eduardo’s position within his family. Here all groups, bilingual and monolingual alike, highlighted the need for the mother to learn English and so relieve Eduardo of the burden of acting as her language broker. They also all recognised the tension he must feel between wanting to support his mother and needing to attend school. Young people who had themselves acted as language brokers were far more likely to suggest explicit strategies that could help, such as the mother going to language classes or Eduardo telling his mother what to say to the doctor rather than going with her.

Finally, the young people were asked how Eduardo’s teachers and his friends might view his actions. In all three groups, contrasting opinions were given about how teachers would react, with some children thinking teachers would be sympathetic whilst others thought teachers would see Eduardo’s behaviour as ‘wrong’. Far more children in the monolingual group thought teachers would completely disapprove of his missing school. There were marked differences between the monolingual and bilingual groups about how Eduardo’s friends might react: those with experience of language brokering thought his friends would see his behaviour as normal, whilst the other groups were more likely to say that his friends would think it ‘strange’ or view it negatively.

The researchers conclude that personal experience has an important impact on how young people perceive bilingualism. Their analysis showed that all the young people in their study accepted that during childhood and early adolescence a person’s chief responsibility should be to meet school requirements but that they should also meet family obligations. It also showed that they were aware of the tension between the developing autonomy in parent-child relationships whilst maintaining connectedness, but it highlighted different emphases in the balancing of this tension which was related to participants’ different personal experiences of bilingualism and language brokering.

For links to English Language teaching resources and for a suggested English A level language investigation related to this topic click here.

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Tony Cline, Sarah Crafter, Lindsay O’Dell and Guida de Abreu  (2011) Young people’s representations of language brokering. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 32/3: 207-220.

doi: 10.1080/01434632.2011.558901  

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire