Euro-English

Perspectives on the emergence of a new European variety of English are presented. It is shown how processes such as discoursal nativization & fossilization contribute to the development of a distinct variety of Euro-English. It is further suggested that the description & codification of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is the first step towards its formation & acceptance as a new variety of English. This variety will not derive its norms for acceptability from native-speaker English, but instead from its usage among non-native English speakers. At the U of Vienna, an examination of a corpus of spoken ELF has shown how speakers of this variety tend to regularize the grammatical peculiarities of native English. Evidence from the corpus also suggests that mutual accommodation & discourse strategies are more important for effective communication than adhering to native English norms & expectations. Euro-English accents are also investigated. It has been found that the primary factor determining the pronunciation of ESL speakers when speaking to one another is mutual intelligibility (Jenkins, 2000). This is expected to have an effect on the way that the pronunciation of Euro-English will come to be established over time. Core features characteristic to the pronunciation of Euro-English are briefly outlined. It is argued that in the future, native-English speakers will need to be proficient in Euro-English as a second language, acquiring non-core regional L2 pronunciations & grammatical constructions in order to communicate effectively with mainland Europeans. 10 References. A. Rice