Can you think that thought in English? Cross-cultural contexts and the use of English as lingua franca
When I came to live in England in 2000, I met a wonderful lady called Mary. Soon we found that we really got on well with each other despite the age difference – Mary was 76 and I was 32. One of the things we bonded over was our love of the BBC Proms. Since Mary’s passing away in 2016, it has been a little difficult for me to watch the Proms because the absence of Mary’s quiet but expansive joy in all things beautiful often drowns out the pleasure of the music. Yet I do still dip in and out of the glorious experience as time allows.
The Proms, however, have been changing. Writing in The Spectator, Philip Hensher noted the changing social attitudes towards classical music that have prompted a greater inclusion of more popular works in recent years. Naturally, as a person of Indian descent, I was struck even more by the move from ‘the old all-nighters of classical Indian music’ to ‘a Bollywood evening’ this year.
I have grown up with Bollywood music piping through the radio permanently switched on in the back room in our house, where we studied to its beat, glowing with a thrilling sense of youthful rebellion against my grandfather’s draconian rules forbidding the ‘morally corrupt, despicable’ music. He rarely visited the back room and we knew we were safe in our rebelling.
Yet, youthful rebellions notwithstanding, a respect for the difficult and exalted art of classical music was also subtly woven into the fabric of our worldview on other occasions and through other means. As a result, I could enter into Mary’s glorying in the classical concerts with heartfelt delight, though with far less understanding than hers of the finer points of the music. The greatness of good art is that it can be known through the senses as much as through the mind and, if the chance presented itself, I was willing to learn what Mary had to share and vice versa.
It was that shared curiosity about the world and its myriad wonderful ways of expressing itself, without denying our own more limited cultural anchoring, that allowed Mary and I to revel in learning about each other’s worlds.
More and more, due to a variety of factors such as globalisation and the recent Covid-19 pandemic, the opportunity to thus expand our cultural horizons by interacting with people from around the world on a daily basis has grown. A recent publication from the British Council, titled ‘In our rapidly changing world what is the future of the English language?’, has concluded that ‘The world of work has changed.’ It continues to point out that: ‘Multilingual and multicultural workforces are not uncommon, whether people are working remotely or in the same location. English is often the lingua franca and sometimes the official language of business as chosen by organisations. The very concept of international, dispersed teams changes and expands the parameters of English for work.’
Some of the ways in which these changes and expansion in the parameters of English have been noticeable go beyond the world of work. This proliferation of intercultural interactions has shaken or challenged some established cultural dogmas, one of which is the questioning of the hitherto undisputed belief in the status of Western cultural artefacts as ‘supreme cultural statements of humanity’ (The changing face of the BBC Proms | The Spectator). In the Spectator article, Philip Hensher went on to say that within his own lifetime, Western classical music has gone from that elevated position to becoming ‘just another curious musical genre, like hardbag, grime or jazz’.
More strikingly, the relatively recent spread of wider awareness of language as a carrier of culture (Language – Communication, Grammar, Culture | Britannica) means that this expansion of cultural boundaries requires an expansion in the cultural constructs carried by Western languages. Ironically, this is most easily achieved for languages that have helped establish the notion of Western cultural superiority through their enmeshment in the European colonial enterprise in the modern era because they are already known to significant groups of non-native speakers too. Being the most widely spoken language in the world, English leads this group.
There are now more non-native than native speakers of English around the globe and it is increasingly recognised as the lingua franca of global business and education. Perhaps the wheel has come full circle when the language that was the vehicle for teaching the superiority of a colonial way of thinking is now becoming the spring breeze of Shelley’s imagining: calling forth the ‘sweet buds’ of words and experience of English-knowing peoples around the world, which so far have been lying ‘cold and low’ in its emotional hinterland like unacknowledged seeds under the earth during winter, to blossom forth in ‘living hues and odours’ filling the English-speaking world with a stunning conceptual diversity.
So it was that at the Proms of 2023, it wasn’t only that classical Indian music had been swapped for the more popular Bollywood music, but that the presenters made sure to mention the honorifics normally used for the doyen of Bollywood music, Lata Mangeshkar, in their tribute to her. They made reference to ‘Lata ji’ and ‘didi’, which were the terms most Indians still use when referring to this towering celebrity of popular Indian music.
It is not that the speakers could not have translated these to more ‘traditional’ English usage by simply mentioning the singer’s full name. But by using and emphasising these terms in their original form they were capturing and conveying a form of celebrity that is more familiar to ‘non-Western’ populations in general, and to those in South Asia in particular. Combining a ‘warm familiarity’, conveyed through familial terms with a respectful authority that is more ‘chaste’ than ‘glamorous’ or ‘powerful’, this concept is in sharp contrast to the Western concept of celebrity. Looking at the Wikipedia page about ‘honorifics in popular music’ (Honorific nicknames in popular music – Wikipedia), the far greater use of royal and aristocratic titles to convey a similar status in the West demonstrates that contrast.
Both ‘didi’ and ‘ji’ are included in the Oxford English Dictionary and their use before a largely Western audience at the Royal Albert Hall signalled a changing attitude in the use and expectations of English. The definitions and their use together helped expand the meanings of celebrity available to English-users throughout the world. By reflecting the experiences of the variety of its speakers, this is English as a lingua franca in action.
The accommodation of this emotional cultural variance amongst English-speaking populations is an exciting, though not uncontroversial, development.
From language to language-teaching, this expansion in the meanings and uses of English is also reflected in the switch from the predominance of the term ‘English as Foreign Language (EFL)’ to ‘English as Lingua Franca (ELF)’ to describe the teaching of English to ‘non-native’ speakers. In their recent publication Future of English: Global Perspectives, one of the future trends identified by some British Council writers was ‘the paradigm shift away from EFL will continue, with pedagogies that emphasise global English and multilingual realities gaining more ground.’ (p.328)
The trend creates new challenges as well as opportunities. With more non-native speakers than ever conducting business- and education-related conversations with other non-native speakers, not only the pedagogies, but also the resources needed to teach ‘sociolinguistic’ () competence in particular, will need to change too. Sociolinguistic competence covers ‘the knowledge and skills required to deal with the social dimension of language use’ and draws on ‘knowledge of the world, sociocultural knowledge and intercultural awareness’ amongst other factors.
With a growing number of cultural contexts and backgrounds to include in teaching such communicative skills as understanding conventions of politeness, ways of giving and receiving feedback, understanding humour and idiomatic language or simply registering differences in accents and dialects, ‘this area of language can be quite challenging to address in a BE(LF) [Business English in ELF] course’(p. 83).
It is important to remember that ‘the priority for students using ELF … is to be as intelligible as possible to the people they are communicating with. This does not necessarily mean sounding like a native speaker’ (How to teach English as a lingua franca (ELF) | British Council). In this, teachers, writers, academics, publishers, in fact, any and all language practitioners can contribute by expanding the cultural conceptual boundaries of the language.
I recently worked on the children’s book The Proudest Blue, which tells the story of a hijab-wearing Muslim child from ‘inside’; a child who says that it is not only ‘normal’, but even ‘special’,to wear the hijab because ‘it means being strong’. Running counter to its collocations with female oppression in the dominant English-language discourse so far, the word ‘hijab’ can now conjure up images of strong women wearing the hijab too. English-speakers around the world can now have the cultural concepts and the vocabulary to think that thought in English too!
As Gayle Cotton, a successful cross-cultural communications trainers and the author of Say Anything to Anyone, Anywhere : 5 Keys to Successful Cross-Cultural Communication(p. 1), has wisely advised that in cross-cultural communication ‘it’s important to remember that words are nothing more than symbols … an assigned sound to represent an association of ideas that can mean something different to everyone’ (p. 70). In the changing landscape of teaching English as a lingua franca, building that ‘awareness is the first step’ (p. 1).
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash