Page 226 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

204 Christiane Meierkord

Generally, lingua francas of all three types mentioned above allow for the
communication of content which goes beyond the mere exchange of transac-
tional phrases used to conduct business. Tok Pisin, a pidgin / creole which has
been spoken in Papua New Guinea for more than 120 years (Mühlhäusler 1986),
is one of the lingua francas which started out as jargons used by traders in the
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Pacific region. Today Tok Pisin is one of the official languages used in Papua
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New Guinea, a country with, currently, 823 living languages. Tok Pisin is used
for administrative purposes, in education, and there is a Newspaper (Wantok) as
well as a broadcast station using Tok Pisin as their medium. The pidgin is also
used in interethnic marriages and the offspring of these couples speak Tok Pisin
in a creolized form.
Several lingua francas have also developed considerable bodies of litera-
ture, both prose and poetry. Meeuwis (2002) discusses the works of the poet
Kayo Lampe who uses Lingala, a creole spoken in central Africa, for the
poems which he writes and publishes in, and for, the Congolese diaspora com-
munity in Belgium. This is in stark contrast to the majority of Congolese
writers, who overwhelmingly have chosen French as their working language.
Meeuwis also points out that Lingala has come to be used by the majority of
the Congolese immigrants as the “lingua franca at levels of informal com-
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munication in the diaspora” (2002: 31). With increased access to the internet,
individuals have also started to utilize this medium for the dissemination of
prose and poetry. For example, writers from across the African continent have
found a platform to publish their creative writing across speech community
boundaries at www.crossingborders-africanwriting.org. This project aims at
opening up “shared creative and cultural space. Our emphasis will be on
building a new international community of writers, on new work for a new
world.” Even the international Esperanto community uses the engineered lin-
gua franca as an expressive medium. As Fiedler (2006) points out, a number
of authors have chosen to publish both lyric poetry as well as prose fiction, re-
sulting in a body of approximately ten thousand pieces of original literature in
Esperanto.
The discussions of the cultural content of lingua franca communication
mainly investigate discourse conventions. However, lingua franca communi-
cation is also interaction across speakers of different forms of the language used
as the lingua franca. As such it is a form of language contact. In addition to re-
garding lingua franca communication as involving interaction across ethnicities
or cultures, discussions of lingua franca communication also need to take into
account that its speakers command at least two languages, albeit not necessarily
at equally high levels of proficiency (Meierkord 2005). Thus, lingua franca
communication implies language contact both in each individual, bilingual or
multilingual, speaker as well as across the speakers participating in an interac-
tion conducted via a lingua franca.