English as a lingua franca (ELF) in international workplaces in Japan

What is it about?

This article describes how English is used in naturally occurring conversations in three international workplaces in Japan. The majority of participants are non-native speakers, from a wide range of language, cultural, and educational backgrounds, and with varying experience in intercultural encounters. Accordingly, the syntactic and discourse features they bring into these conversations are diverse. Also, what is most notable is that features (read, patterns and/or conventions) evolve out of the cooperation between the participants. The way in which the resulting language practices evolve resembles the evolution of language in historical multilingual contexts (for example, creoles in European colonies).

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Why is it important?

The academic discipline of English as a lingua franca is still in the early stages of developing theoretical frameworks and interpretive approaches. It is important to situate the study of ELF in the wider and historical study of languages in multilingual contact environments (trade languages of the past, colonial creoles, regional varieties of world languages, etc.), so as to discern clearly what processes are at work.