Page 228 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

206 Christiane Meierkord

franca may also develop their very own discourse conventions. In another study,
Pölzl (2003) discusses how for example both Austrian as well as Japanese
speakers meeting in Cairo, Egypt, use Japanese and German toasting formulae
prost and kanpai (‘Cheers’) when interacting in English as a lingua franca. This
can not be explained by the “habitat”, which is Egypt. Rather the participants in
the interaction seem to appreciate each others’ cultural identities.
Examples for regionally used lingua francas are, for example, Swahili,
which is used in Kenya and Uganda, Sango used in the Central African Repub-
lic, or Putonghua, the Mandarin Chinese variety which serves in the People’s Re-
public of China. These lingua francas have also been called ‘languages of wider
communication’ (Stewart 1968). Unfortunately, there is to date no research into
the linguistic characteristics of lingua franca communication conducted in these
languages. The intranational use of lingua francas has often been the result of
colonialization, which resulted in arbitrarily drawn nation boundaries that paid
little respect to the citizens’ mother tongues. As a result, peoples speaking dif-
ferent languages came to constitute one nation, and a language was required to
allow for administration of the country as well as for interaction between the
different peoples. Many of the post-colonial states are multilingual to such an
extent that, for practical reasons, one or several lingua francas need to be de-
cided on to guarantee the feasibility of administration, education etc. The in-
digenous languages frequently existed in non-standardized oral forms only, and
no writing system had been devised for them at the time when a decision for one
or more official languages was taken.
When two or more languages are used within one country, this implies bi-
lingualism, both at the level of the society as well as at the individual level.
Kachru describes bilingualism as the “linguistic behaviour of the members of a
speech community which alternately uses two, three or more languages depend-
ing on the situation and function” (Kachru 1986: 159). His quote indicates that
the language serving as a lingua franca in these settings is usually chosen to per-
form specific functions such as the ones outlined above. Furthermore, it is often
given the status of the country’s national or official language. A national lan-
guage is “a language which serves the entire area of a nation rather than a re-
gional or ethnic subdivision” (Eastman 2001: 657). In contrast, official lan-
guages are those languages used within a nation to conduct the business of its
government. As such, there can be regionally used co-official languages.
The following sections discuss a selection of multilingual nations to illus-
trate the different approaches taken by individual countries.