Published in K. Knapp & C. Meierkord (Eds.), Lingua franca communication (pp. 269-302). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2002. Reproduced here with kind permission from the publisher, editors and author.
    Barbara Seidlhofer (University of Vienna)

    The shape of things to come? Some basic questions about English as a lingua franca

    Introduction: 'English' as a global lingua franca
    'English', whatever may be meant by this designation, is the language in which most lingua franca communication worldwide is now taking place. This predominance is well documented (cf. e.g. Crystal 1997, Graddol 1997). Although, as these authors argue, this predominance may well turn out to be a temporary one, maybe for approximately the next 50 years, for the time being the global use of English is still on the increase, and markedly so (cf. e.g. Ammon 1996 for the European Union).1
        The reaction to this state of affairs among the population at large and government agencies covers the whole spectrum from enthusiasm to rejection and counter-offensive. Among academics, however, it seems fair to say that attitudes are mainly (though by no means exclusively) negative, with calls for resistance to the hegemony of English gaining considerable momentum over the last decade or so (e.g. Canagarajah 1999, Pennycook 1994, 1998, Phillipson 1992, Smith and Forman 1997).
        This critical literature includes treatments of historical, cultural, ecological, educational, socio-political and psychological issues, obviously with a good deal of overlap among these areas. In both the areas of language use and (particularly) language learning and teaching, challenges have been formulated which call into question the native speakers' long-accepted 'ownership of English' (Widdowson 1994.2 Ammon (2000) presents arguments for moving 'towards more fairness in International English' but does (still) feel a need for a question-mark in the second part of his article's title: "Linguistic Rights of Non- native Speakers?".3 Ammon is concerned mainly with non-native speakers' rights to 'linguistic peculiarities' (2000: 111) when using English in the international scientific community. He convincingly demonstrates that the insistence on native-speaker norms acts as a powerful gate-keeping device which has little to do with intelligibility but a great deal with socio-economic factors - an observation which recalls Wolff's seminal 1964 paper describing the phenomenon of non-reciprocal intelligibility between two tribes who to all intents and purposes speak the same language: the Kalabari, the largest and most prosperous group in the Eastern Niger Delta claim not to understand the Nembe, their poor country cousin neighbours. The Nembe, on the other hand, say they have no problem understanding the Kalabari. For Kalabari we can read 'native speakers of English', and for Nembe, 'non-native speakers of English'.
        Concerns are voiced about 'English only' in Europe (Ammon et al 1994) and worldwide (Phillipson & Skuttnab-Kangas 1996). One also hears emotive condemnations of English as the killer language. In language teaching and learning, a recognition has been gaining ground of the need to reconsider the status of 'non-native speakers' of English. Even in second language acquisition research, with its traditional dependency on native speaker norms against which to measure interlanguage development, the view has been put forward that 'non- native' speakers need to be regarded as language users in their own right (Cook 1999). Whole volumes are dedicated to discussing the specific assets of 'non- native' speaker teachers of English (Medgyes 1994, Braine 1999). Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (Lantolf 2000) underlies arguments for an 'appropriate pedagogy' emphasizing the importance of respecting and building on local values, beliefs and ways of doing things (e.g. Holliday 1994, Kramsch & Sullivan 1996) and some language testing specialists have demonstrated how irrelevant and potentially damaging it can be to insist on native-speaker norms when assessing the proficiency of English in the 'Outer Circle' (Lowenberg 2000) - an argument which would have to be investigated for 'Expanding Circle' contexts, too.4
        There is, then, no shortage of opinions, proposals and critiques regarding the status of English and its international role as a lingua franca. Despite all this intellectual activity on a meta-level, however, one might be forgiven for calling the state of the art in this area a 'hubbub without a hub', for curiously little thought has so far gone into what surely must be the very heart of the matter:5 the nature of the language itself as an international means of communication, and in what respects English as a lingua franca (ELF) differs from 'English as a native language' (ENL).6 Some research into this linguistic phenomenon is now being undertaken, but it is still in its infancy (Jenkins 1998 and 2000 for phonology, and for pragmatics, e.g. Firth 1996, House 1999 and this volume, Lesznyak this volume and forthc., Meierkord 1996).
        In addition to these studies with strong empirical bases, there is also a considerable body of conceptual work about English as an international lingua franca, which dates back to the first half of the 20th century and is associated with the proposals for a simplified form of English which was given the name Basic. The objective of this chapter is to present a synopsis of the conceptual framework underlying Basic English and to demonstrate that current research into lingua franca communication (in English but also in other languages) could benefit considerably from taking into account some of the quite radical ideas which informed the design of Basic.

    Which model for English as a lingua franca?

    It is important to appreciate that the questions "What does, or could, ELF look like? How can it be described and codified?" are not 'purely linguistic' questions, posed in an ivory tower and detached from the 'real world'.7 As long as there is not some sort of ELF model to make reference to, the only, hence default, descriptive reality available when talking about 'English' is ENL. The scarcity of descriptive ELF data has resulted in a 'conceptual gap' which forces any discussion on the meta-level into a vicious circle, thereby reducing many desirable proposals for socio-political change to the level of rhetoric and making it practically impossible to act upon them (cf. Seidlhofer forthc.).8
        Where, then, do we turn for a relevant, feasible and acceptable model for ELF which could put ELF users on an equal footing with ENL users in international communication? And which criteria would such a model have to meet?
        To start with the criteria, the 'meta-level' literature which I briefly sketched above yields quite a comprehensive catalogue of problems which can be used as pointers towards design features for a possible ELF model. The most important ones would seem to be the following, sketched in very rough outline here for reasons of space:
        a) While still making use of a code which is recognizably English (since we are talking about English as a lingua franca), the ELF model should not be exonormatively oriented towards native-speaker usage but endonormative. That is to say, it should be recognized that, partly due to the sheer numbers of people involved, the international ELF speech community should no longer be regarded as what Kachru (1985: 16f.) has termed "norm-dependent", but as "norm- developing" and, ultimately, "norm-providing" (the latter two terms being used by Kachru for indigenised varieties and native-speaker varieties).
        b) To realize the idea of an ELF model which is endonormative rather than exonormative, a very obvious requirement is a broad empirical base. The (rather daunting) task here would be to record in as many settings as possible how speakers from different L1 backgrounds actually communicate through ELF, how they co-construct 'English' in the process. Such a corpus of ELF use will be a prerequisite for an eventual codification of features of ELF (cf Seidlhofer, forthc.).
        c) While cultural 'neutrality' of a language is clearly an impossibility, there are nevertheless degrees of cultural 'loadedness', with proverbs and idioms at the culture-specific end of the spectrum. As distinct from the use speakers make of it, the ELF model as such should be as free as possible of such 'prefabricated' cultural baggage taken over from ENL cultures, because the primary cultures of, say, the U.K. or the U.S. have, by definition, no privileged status when English is used as a lingua franca by speakers from a variety of cultures. In that sense, "language stripped bare" (cf. Meierkord's title, this volume) could actually be taken to denote a desirable quality - not in order to limit people to an instrument that can only handle bland and boring talk, but precisely the opposite, to create space to enable them to infuse the code with their own cultural peculiarities, a creative process which has been demonstrated so successfully in literatures in English. The way in which Chinua Achebe uses Nigerian English in his novels is a particularly striking, and often cited, example; an even more extreme one is Daniel Okara's novel The Voice.
        Criteria a) to c) have to do with defining target objectives, the basic argument being that these do not have to be predicated on native speaker norms. But if ELF is to be pedagogically effective, i.e. in order to be taught and learnt successfully, it clearly also has to be so designed as to activate the process of learning. In other words, ELF needs to account not only for a goal but also a means of getting there. We therefore need to add another criterion:
        d) Since ELF is, by definition, not the native language of its users, an ELF model for learners should accordingly not be dictated by any native-speaker language use, but instead its design should be guided by pedagogical principles rather than only linguistic ones. That is to say, insights from the psychology of learning should be taken into account, and considerations of learnability and teachability would have to be crucial design features. These would include criteria for selection, grading and presentation and aim at a considerable reduction of complexity, chiefly through elimination of communicative redundancy (see Mackey 1965).9
        Essentially, then, an ELF model would have to build equally on descriptive and pedagogical criteria and should aim at a formulation of minimal requirements for intelligibility and maximal flexibility for actual use. One such eventual use might indeed be one that approximates to English as a native language if the circumstances require it, as one option among many to be left open to individual users.

    Existing proposals for English as an international language

    Having offered this rather rough and simplified summary of crucial design criteria as I see them for an ELF model to become feasible as an alternative reality to ENL, I shall take a look at some ideas which have actually been proposed for English as an international language (as it is most commonly called), and consider how these proposals fare when judged according to the criteria I have sketched.

    Nuclear English

    In his contribution to Brumfit (1982), Quirk discusses "International communication and the concept of Nuclear English" (his title). In fact, the denomination 'Nuclear English' might raise exaggerated expectations as it seems to suggest an entire, new model for English. However, what Quirk's proposal really amounts to is an airing of ideas about the ways in which native English might be modified to make it easier to learn as a foreign language and easier to use as an international language. So Quirk does not propose a complete system; rather, he offers some examples, especially in the area of grammar, particularly verbs. Thus, he proposes some simplifications such as the replacement of non- restrictive relative clauses with adverbial clauses (1 => 1a) or replacement of ditransitive constructions with the corresponding prepositional alternative (2 => 2a):
    1 . I expressed my sympathy to the captain, who had been reprimanded. =>
    1a. I expressed my sympathy to the captain because he had been reprimanded.
    2 . We offered the girl a drink. =>
    2a. We offered a drink to the girl.
    (Quirk 1982: 20, 22)
    While there are certainly ideas in Nuclear English that it might be useful to follow up for ELF, Quirk's (1982: 21) insistence on remaining "firmly in the grammar of ordinary English" [i.e. ENL] means that his proposal does not satisfy my criterion a) (endonormativity). Quirk is proposing a selection from existing alternatives and does not countenance the possibility of forms which are not already available in the grammar of (his) ENL. Since acceptability is thus determined purely on the basis of native-speaker judgements, it is also very unlikely, despite Quirk's own assertion that Nuclear English is "culture-free as calculus" (op. cit.: 19) that criterion c) can be met to any extent. There is no evidence of Quirk having systematically considered d) (pedagogical principles), nor is there an empirical base (criterion b) - instead, his proposals are based on identifying and exploiting redundancy within the code of Standard English.

    World Standard Spoken English

    Fifteen years later, Crystal sketched his view of a possible development of English as an international language, namely "World Standard Spoken English" (WSSE). It is only given a couple of pages in his English as a global language (1997: 136ff.), probably because "WSSE is still in its infancy. Indeed, it has hardly yet been born." (ibid.: 138). WSSE can therefore not really be called a model, but I mention it here because it raises issues that bear directly on the idea of ELF usage I discussed above, especially in the following two extracts:
    There is even a suggestion that some of the territories of the expanding circle - those in which English is learned as a foreign language - may be bending English to suit their purposes. (op.cit.: 136)

    Which variety will be most influential, in the development of WSSE? It seems likely that it will be US (rather than UK) English. [...] No feature of L2 English has yet become a part of standard US or UK English; but, as the balance of speakers changes, there is no reason for L2 features not to become part of WSSE. This would be especially likely if there were features which were shared by several (or all) L2 varieties - such as the use of syllable-timed rhythm, or the widespread difficulty observed in the use of th sounds.10 (op.cit.: 138)
    We may note the persistence of a native-speaker perspective in these extracts - notably the phrases "even a suggestion." and "bending English to suit their purposes" in the first extract and the formulation of the second, which accords a privileged role to "US or UK English" in the development of WSSE. It needs to be remembered, of course, that Crystal is not making a programmatic statement here in the sense I am attempting to do, but is simply recording a process he has been observing. In terms of my criteria a) - d), however, WSSE cannot be regarded as a candidate for an ELF model.11

    Basic English

    Having considered some recent ideas concerning English as a global language, it is apparent that these are not, generally speaking, strikingly innovative. One can imagine something much more radical, and indeed something much more radical has been imagined. Nearly three quarters of a century ago, H.G. Wells had already anticipated the kind of development this paper is concerned with:
    One of the unanticipated achievements of the twenty-first century was the rapid diffusion of Basic English as the lingua franca of the world and the even more rapid modification, expansion and spread of English in its wake. [...] This convenience spread like a wildfire after the First Conference of Basra. It was made the official medium of communication throughout the world by the Air and Sea Control, and by 2020 there was hardly anyone in the world who could not talk and understand it.[...] The new Science was practically unendowed, it attracted few workers, and it was lost sight of during the decades of disaster. It was revived only in the early twenty-first century.(Wells 1933: 418f., 421)
    Wells' vision of the shape of things to come in terms of "the lingua franca of the world", then, is Basic English - hence the title of my contribution to this volume. Wells calls his book The Shape of Things to Come. The Ultimate Revolution, from which this extract is taken, "a Short History of the Future" (ibid.: 14). Apart from the fascination this sci-fi classic holds for readers inhabiting this very future, and the delight the recognition of language as a crucial element in that scenario may generate in linguists, there are a number of intriguing 'predictions' in the above passage which are worth dwelling on a little.
        First, Wells seems not to have anticipated that English would spread so widely in the latter part of his own century, and he calls the "rapid diffusion of Basic English" an "unanticipated achievement" - in this respect he appears to share the pride of the native speaker in his language, a trait which we also attributed to Quirk and Crystal. However, a second point worth noting is that the "spread of English" is presented as happening in the "wake" of the diffusion of Basic English, that is to say, the dependency is inverted compared to traditional views, in which English (conceived of as ENL) first spreads around the globe and then changes in the process. Also, for Wells it seems to be obvious that the "spread of English" has to be accompanied, or even preceded if the sequence is significant, by its "modification", so there can be no question of adhering to native speaker norms when English is "the lingua franca of the world".
        It is also interesting that Wells quite unemotionally calls Basic English a "convenience", i.e. not a means of identification but an instrument for communication, and that he sees its spread primarily linked to specific purposes, namely the "Air and Sea Control". Lastly, we learn that "the new Science" of Basic "was revived only in the early twenty-first century" - the point at which we find ourselves now.
        I should like to argue, then, that Wells is pointing us to a very pertinent proposal for an ELF model - pertinent not because it offers us any ready-made or viable solutions, but because it helps us bring into focus and think through many of the issues which simply have to be confronted in any serious attempt at formulating principles for a description and pedagogy of English as a global lingua franca. Incidentally, the date 2020 also seems to be quite fortuitously chosen by Wells: Graddol's (1997: 60) projection for speakers of English and the ELT market for the period 1950 to 2050 indicates, around 2020, a levelling-out of the increase of the numbers of EFL learners, which may be due to a "leakage of EFL speakers to L2 status", and a decline in the share in the global ELT market held by ENL countries "as providers from L2 territories become more active" (ibid.) - a projection which may well turn out to be correct particularly if substantial alternatives to ENL materialize by then.
        What is this Basic English, then, that Wells is referring to? BASIC stands for British American Scientific International Commercial. The first main point in this context is that Basic English (henceforth Basic for short) was conceived from the outset as a lingua franca at a time when the need for a uniting, universal language for international communication was felt particularly acutely after the first World War. Secondly, it is not just a reduced form of 'full-blown' English but a language in its own right, and thus comparable with parallel efforts such as Jespersen's Novial (Jespersen 1929) or of course Esperanto (cf. Fiedler, this volume).12
        In the years of research that went into the design of Basic, its 'only begetter', the Cambridge philosopher and logician Charles Ogden, built on the work in theoretical semantics which he had undertaken jointly with I.A. Richards for their seminal book The Meaning of Meaning (1923). This research enabled him to formulate something that one might call 'the essence of English', a vocabulary of only 850 words and a handful of grammar rules. It may be worth quoting from Ogden's own explanation at length and then to use this extract for homing in on some of the issues it highlights. (I have grouped them thematically and given the groups my own headings, as well as numbers for ease of reference):
    i) the nature of the language Basic English is an attempt to give to everyone a second, or international, language which will take as little of the learner's time as possible. It is a system in which everything may be said for all the purposes of everyday existence : the common interests of men and women, general talk, news, trade, and science.
    To the eye and ear it will not seem in any way different from normal English.

    ii) words and rules: a system for 'investment'
    There are only 850 words in the complete list which may be clearly printed on one side of a bit of note-paper. But simple rules are given for making other words with the help of those in the list; such as designer, designing and designed, from design, or air-plane from air and plane.
    The word order is fixed by other short rules, which make it clear from an example such as "I will put the record on the machine now." what is the right and natural place for every sort of word.
    Whatever is doing the act comes first; then the time word, such as will; then the act or operation put, take, or get ; then the thing to which something is done, and so on.
    It is an English in which 850 words do all the work of 20,000, and has been formed by taking out everything which is not necessary to the sense. Disembark, for example, is broken up into get off a ship. I am able takes the place of I can ; shape is covered by the more general word form ; and difficult by the use of hard.
    By putting together the names of simple operations - such as get, give, come, go, put, take - with the words for directions like in, over, through, and the rest, two or three thousand complex ideas, like insert which becomes put in, are made part of the learner's store.
    . . .
    In addition to the Basic words themselves, the learner has at the start about fifty words which are now so common in all languages that they may be freely used for any purpose. Examples are Radio, Hotel, Telephone, Bar, Club. Records like the one now on your machine will make it clear what the sounds are to be like.
    For the needs of any science, a short special list gets the expert to a stage where international words are ready to hand.

    iii) language as an instrument for thought and for learning
    Those who have no knowledge of English will be able to make out the sense of a Radio Talk, or a business letter, after a week with the word-list and the records ; but it may be a month or two before talking and writing freely are possible.
    An Englishman will make an adjustment to Basic ways of thought in a very short time, but at first he will have to take some trouble to be clear and simple.
    In fact, it is the business of all internationally-minded persons to make Basic English part of the system of education in every country, so that there may be less chance of war, and less learning of languages - which, after all, for most of us, are a very unnecessary waste of time. (Ogden 1935: 13ff.; emphases added)
    Apart from giving us a general idea as to what Basic is like, this passage also brings up a number of key issues which, I would suggest, are just as relevant for thinking about lingua franca communication today as they were over 70 years ago. However, at least some of them are often lost sight of in today's discussions. I therefore propose to go through the extract and highlight some of these issues as well as attempting to link them up with the contemporary debate about English as a global language which I sketched in the introduction to this paper.13

    Basic English and lingua franca communication

    i) the nature of the language

    a second, or international, language
    The distinction between devising a system for lingua franca purposes from the outset on the one hand and, on the other, pressing into service for that role a (standard) dialect of an existing (national) language native to specific speech communities is fundamental although it cannot, of course, be upheld in any pure form. As has often been critically remarked, for instance by Ogden (1935) about Esperanto, even supposedly 'neutral' artificial languages are always biased towards certain natural languages and therefore likely to favour particular native speaker communities. However, this is still vastly preferable to the opposite extreme, which in the case of English has meant that for decades, the language has been described with ever-increasing precision entirely in terms of authentic native speaker use in native speaker communities and then, with hardly any further sociolinguistic or pedagogical enquiry, assumed to be relevant for foreign language classrooms throughout the world (cf. Seidlhofer 1999). It would seem to be obvious that making a virtue of associating a target language as closely as possible with the native-speaker communities and cultures it emanates from is likely to be counterproductive in most ELF contexts, since there the language is predominantly studied in order to be used for communication not with native speakers but with other 'non-native' speakers. It would also seem to be obvious that proceeding in this way is likely to be perceived, whether intended or not, as forcing alien norms and values onto the people at the receiving end, and to create a no-win situation for them in that the ideal learning goal, namely 'becoming a native speaker' is unattainable by definition (cf. Medgyes 1994). As I see it, Ogden's very radical approach to the design of Basic sets him apart from his (probably more influential) contemporaries Harold Palmer (e.g. Palmer & Hornby 1937) and Michael West (e.g. 1934, 1953), who were committed to developing systems for selection and grading essentially based on frequent words in 'natural' English (cf. Bongers 1947: 119ff.). Basic is also different in this respect from Crystal's observations concerning World Standard Spoken English and Quirk's Nuclear English (cf. above) - as I read his article in English Today, Quirk would, in settings which have no nativized varieties of their own, regard any support for deviations from standard English norms as "ill-considered reflexes of liberation linguistics" and "half-baked quackery" (Quirk 1990: 9). In contrast, Ogden's decision to design Basic as an international language from the outset, and thus not to privilege features which native speakers of English would deem idiomatic or 'natural', means that of the four criteria for an ELF model sketched in the second subsection above, criteria a) (endonormativity) and c) (cultural 'space') are met to a considerable extent.

    a system in which everything may be said for all the purposes of everyday existence
    This, of course, begs the question what "the purposes of everyday existence" are, and more importantly, whether there is any point in attempting to answer this question in a general way, i.e. independently of a specific setting of language learning and use. Reading Ogden's passage cooperatively, we can probably agree with his very broad categories "general talk, news, trade, and science". But, as Howatt (1984: 251) explains, Basic is "a reasonably good system for writing simple texts, but it is not an appropriate medium for everyday social interaction in the spoken language. Nor, to be fair, was it intended to be."
        Some people, and certainly some teachers, would find it difficult to take seriously a medium which is not well suited for another important domain of language use and also for language learning, namely the creative aspect which we could describe under the general heading of verbal art - including poetry and language play (cf. Cook 2000). And this is a purpose which Basic does not really lend itself to - a fact which is freely acknowledged by even its most fervent supporters:14
    Impromptu eloquence and after-dinner wit in Basic are tougher assignments. Its thrifty vocabulary is at its best in everyday dealings and explanations, and it is not naturally a spellbinder's medium. (Richards 1943: 114)

    The language, while in universal use, cannot retain the charm and completeness of a native language. It is an expedient, a make-shift. It lacks the satisfying quality of an intimate and exclusive possession. ... Despite its awkwardness, its stop-gap phrases, its colourless vocabulary, it can yet convey many meanings. It cannot give flood to the human soul, but it can provide a bridge to human thought. (Routh 1944: 6)
    These two extracts actually only constitute asides in what are writings in unequivocal praise of Basic English. What Richards and Routh attribute much more significance to are the strengths and pedagogical advantages which are as it were the other side of the coin of the supposed inadequacy referred to here: the most important one of these is that being constructed as it is, Basic lends itself superbly to being used as a tool for clarifying one's own thoughts. This aspect will be dealt with under iii) below. As for pedagogical matters, it is commonly accepted that learners do not only learn what they are taught. Rather, instruction will be regarded as successful if it allows learners to build up a secure enough basis from which they can then pursue their own learning according to their own needs and inclinations, which may include poetry or language play. And in this sense, one might say, Basic provides the basis in that it makes those first steps possible. Ogden and his supporters often emphasized this: "It [Basic] is no rival to or substitute for an ampler English, where the use of that is feasible. It is an introduction and an exploratory instrument." (Richards 1943: vi).
        However, the call for 'natural' English by the supporters of rival schemes and particularly by native-speaker teachers often seemed to have more immediate appeal than an 'unnatural' system which was essentially philosophical and required considerable effort to assimilate. But there is no necessary relationship between naturalness in respect to native speakers and effectiveness for learning. With this in mind, one could say that Basic was not primarily about the goal of learning (e.g. acquiring the words most commonly used by native speakers), but about giving learners a framework for the best possible investment in their own further learning development. This, then, is an indication that criterion d) for an ELF model (see page 274ff. above) was taken into account, i.e. that its design should be guided by pedagogical principles.
        These contrasting points of view were hotly debated in the 1930s and 1940s, but the same issues are alive and well today in the discussion about 'authenticity', one of the most tenacious precepts of communicative language teaching. The argument in favour of 'authenticity' is, of course, that learners must not be taught any language 'contrived' or 'concocted' for teaching and learning, but should be given the benefit of 'real English' as it is spoken by real native speakers amongst themselves. In spite of arguments that have been advanced against taking its pedagogic relevance for granted (see in particular Widdowson 1979, 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2000) the authenticity mantra has been recited and handed down through generations of teacher trainers and textbook writers. Needless to say, stipulating native-speaker language as the one to be used in classrooms has also meant privileging native-speaker teachers. However, an interesting shift of emphasis has begun to take place: in a global context, where the number of ELF users now exceeds the numbers of ENL speakers, native-speaker authenticity is becoming increasingly irrelevant for and incompatible with the realities of lingua franca communication.
        The question is what might take the place of native-speaker norms -- and in addressing this question the careful conceptual work that went into Basic, a revolutionary proposal which abandoned deference to native-speaker 'normality' in favour of pursuing ideals of internationalism, is likely to be of some value - at the very least in that it explored the principles as well as the limits of such an approach.

    not in any way different from normal English
    This claim is of course intricately bound up, and partly in contradiction with, the two preceding it, and discussed above. Still, in a sense it is justified, in that it is indeed possible for Basic to look and sound like "normal English": for instance, the passage by Ogden we are dealing with here is in Basic, but then Ogden was bound to be supremely good at writing in Basic, and also he would have taken particular care in texts whose primary purpose was to extol the virtues of his scheme. But quite often Basic has been criticised for allowing 'impossible' constructions and requiring unwieldy circumlocutions where a simple, high- frequency word would say it all. For instance, Bongers (1947) juxtaposes several original texts with their Basic versions to illustrate these shortcomings, among them this extract from E.A. Poe's The Gold Bug and the Basic Version, The Gold Insect, devised by A.P. Rossiter (1932): 
      Basic:

      As I was taking it, the deep-throated 
voice of a dog came to our ears, and 
then the sound of nails on the door. 
Jupiter went to it, and a great 
Newfoundland dog of Legrand's came 
loudly in, got its feet up on my arms, 
and kept putting its nose against me in a 
loving way: for I had given it much 
attention at other times.


      Original:

      As I received it a loud growl was heard, 
succeeded by scratching at the door. 
Jupiter opened it, and a large 
Newfoundland, belonging to Legrand, 
rushed in, leaped upon my shoulders, and 
loaded me with caresses; for I had shown 
him much attention during previous 
visits.

Bongers (1947: 123)

        At the other extreme of the spectrum is a book which has nothing to do with linguistics or language teaching, McGrath's Twentieth Century Houses (1934), about the architecture of the very end of the 19th century and up to the 1920s. This book is frequently referred to as a particularly successful, elegant work written entirely in Basic - in order to make it more accessible to an international readership. In his epilogue to it, Ogden points out, naturally in Basic, the close parallels between the austere functionalism and clear lines of the architecture of the day and the design of Basic:
    In building with words there is the same pull between the science of structure and the art of ornament as there is in building with steel and stone and wood; .
        Mr McGrath is an architect with a language-sense. In using Basic for his book, he has had in mind something more than the fact, important enough in itself, that this step would give him an international public. He saw in Basic a language which had the same qualities as the buildings he was writing about, and which had, for this reason, a special value for his purpose.
        Much has been said in this book about international forms in building, about the straightforward use of materials, clear statement, and reasoned design. All these qualities might equally well have been named in connection with Basic English. In fact, it is possible to give a clear account of Basic under these very heads. (McGrath 1934: 221f.)
    Ogden then goes on to give that "clear account of Basic", in which it becomes apparent once more that what is paramount for this system is not authentic native-speaker language use but the possibilities for learning and thinking it opens up through its painstaking consideration of linguistic and pedagogic factors. This emphasis on the importance of 'investment', on Basic as a language to be learned from, of course harks back again (or rather, forward) to contemporary debates, and Ogden would probably have been very interested to read this extract from a "Summary reflection" on a volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics entitled Foundations of Second Language Teaching, and it is likely that he would have recognized some of his own criteria in it (highlighted in italics):
    We need to recognize, it seems to me, that some things can be taught, and some things must be left to be learned. What this means is that decisions always have to be taken as to what is the best investment, what it is that provides learners with an effective basis for further learning. Learners cannot be rehearsed in patterns of appropriate cultural behaviour, and of course they will not be prepared in every particular to cope with all the niceties of communication, but the crucial requirement is that they should have a basic capacity which enables them to learn how to cope when occasion arises. [...] Such a context is bound to set limits on what language learners are explicitly taught, and these cannot of their nature contain "real world communication". But the crucial point is that this is not language to be learned as such, but language to be learned from. (Widdowson 1998b: 331, emphases added)
    It seems to me that the notion of "investment" for further learning becomes particularly crucial in foreign language teaching for lingua franca communication, when the uses the language will be put to are likely to be extremely diverse and hence impossible to predict. A sparse but powerfully productive system along the lines of Basic would seem to offer more potential and scope for further development than trying to replicate "real world communication" through "patterns of appropriate cultural behaviour" in the classroom.
        So far we have been looking at Ogden's fairly general claims concerning the nature of Basic. In the next section of the passage quoted on page 281f. above, he moves on to specific properties of Basic upon which these claims are based. These could be referred to as

    ii) words and rules: a system for 'investment'

    The relevant extracts from Ogden's passage above are the following (with words in square brackets added as fillers for better readability):
    • only 850 words in the complete list -[these] do all the work of 20,000, [arrived at] by taking out everything which is not necessary to the sense
    • simple rules are given for making other words with the help of those in the list
    • act or operation and the words for directions like in, over, through, and the rest, [enable] two or three thousand complex ideas [to be] made part of the learner's store.
    • international words are ready to hand

        A number of comments could be made on these defining features of Basic; and indeed many comments have been made ever since descriptions of Basic first appeared in print. Many of these have been exceedingly critical, and it is easy to seen why. First of all, Ogden's claim that there are "only 850 words in the complete list which may be clearly printed on one side of a bit of note- paper" is literally true in that there is such a list - and in fact a detachable sheet with the word list on one page used to be included with every Basic book published - but this clearly is not the whole story. While the psychological effect of presenting the target language to be learnt in such a simple and summary way ('learn the language at a glance!'), combined with the claim that it can be learnt in a few weeks, may constitute a considerable motivating factor for many learners, the claim that Basic English really consists of only 850 words has been criticised vehemently, and clearly cannot be upheld. In what probably represents the most careful, important criticism of Basic by Ogden's rivals West and Swenson entitled A Critical Examination of Basic English, the authors go into great detail to point out what they themselves summarise thus:
    A vocabulary of 850 words is expanded into a large number of extensions of meaning, compounds and idioms. By means of these extensions, ideas are conveyed which would ordinarily be represented by new words (new sound and letter groups), and an economy is thus effected in the introduction of printed new words into the vocabulary list. (West & Swenson 1934: 9)
    West and Swenson demonstrate very convincingly that Ogden's claim of 850 words is "a considerable understatement" (op.cit.: 10), and that he is basically 'cheating' (my word, not theirs) by, for instance, "using a word in more than one part of speech, e.g. Back (preposition), Back (noun), Back-ing a car" (op.cit.: 7), by making use of suffixation and prefixation, "by compounding words, e.g. verb + preposition, Come round, Come about (=happen)" (op.cit.: 8) and "by extension in the use of a word, e.g. [...] 'Flat' to 'A flat' (=an apartment)" (ibid.) - in fact, all these examples constitute results of Ogden's "simple rules [which] are given for making other words with the help of those in the list; such as designer, designing and designed, from design, or air-plane from air and plane" as explained in the passage we are investigating. Obviously, these rules are often not as easy to apply as Ogden claimed, and so can create learning difficulties rather than making the learning task easier.
        West and Swenson's argument is basically that instead of allowing all these modifications, which might well be very confusing, it would have been preferable to be less rigidly fixed on design principles and to include many frequently used, simple words, thus allowing 'Ask' where Basic has 'Make a request, put a question', 'Eat' for Basic 'Take food' and 'Wife/Husband' for Basic 'Married woman/man' (op.cit.: 32f.). They also give examples of sentences written in West's own 1000-word (2032 item) vocabulary and compare them unfavourably with a 'translation' into Basic, such as:
    West:
    The priest thanked the ladies for their help in making the party so successful.


         		Ogden:
    The servant of the church said it was very kind of the women of good birth to help him in making the meeting of friends come off so well.
    (op.cit.: 34)

    But dismissing Ogden's scheme so readily, or even poking fun at it15, completely and utterly misses the essence of his achievement. This essence is difficult to perceive if Basic is approached with what might be called a 'typical language teacher mindset' with expectations of standard contents and procedures, such as 'teaching the language as it is really spoken' or 'presenting and practising exponents of important notions and functions'. The thinking behind Basic goes much deeper than that - as Richards (1940: 19) puts it, "there is a lot of theory behind Basic and Basic could no more do what it does than an aeroplane could fly the Pacific without the theoretical engineering behind its design." Probably the best synoptic presentation of this thinking is to be found in Catford's 'The Background and Origins of Basic English', published as late as 1950, and, interestingly, in the journal English Language Teaching - that is to say, it must have seemed worthwhile and realistic then to expect 'ordinary' practising teachers to benefit from this quite demanding article. In it, Catford explains how Ogden drew on Jeremy Bentham's distinctions between 'real' entities and 'fictitious' entities, whereby "every fictitious entity bears some relation to some real entity, and cannot otherwise be understood than in so far as that relation is perceived" (Ogden 1932: 12, quoted in Catford 1950: 37). Catford's example for illustrating this distinction is "the belief [...] that in talking of such things as freedom and redness we are referring to independent entities not in space or time, instead of simply free actions and red things" (1950: 36). Bentham's distinction was crucial for Ogden's (and subsequently Ogden and Richard's 1923) work on definition, on getting at the "central, pivotal or key meaning" of each word (Richards 1943: 22). It was the power of definition which made it possible to say essentially everything with a very limited vocabulary. Richards (1943: 23) relates this discovery thus:
    In our joint work we came to the theory and practice of definition. In comparing definitions - definitions of everything, from a sense quality to a force and from a rabbit to a concept - we were struck by the fact that whatever you are defining, certain words keep coming back into your definitions. Define them, and with them you could define anything. That suggests that there might be some limited set of words in terms of which the meanings of all other words might be stated. If so, then a very limited language - limited in its vocabulary but comprehensive in its scope - would be possible.
    This then, in a nutshell, is the principal idea behind Basic. In order to make it operational and to formulate his 850 word vocabulary, however, Ogden had to solve the problem of how to deal with verbs. The crucial point here was the realization that most English verbs can be analysed in combinations involving the verbs come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, and put. Examples often used for illustration by Ogden himself are the verbs ascend, which he analyses into go up , descend into go down , and disembark into go off a ship, thus making systematic use of the analytic potential of English. The latter example corresponds to three elements in the Basic Word List: the two 'operations' 'act' (go) and 'direction' (off), and a 'thing' (a ship).
        Recognizing "the propensity of natural language to 'hide' true meanings behind linguistic representations" (Howatt 1984: 252) was ultimately what enabled Ogden to distil this 'semantic essence' out of a very large vocabulary and to "take out everything which is not necessary to the sense", as he puts it in the passage under discussion. Through this process, then, the 850 word list plus 50 what he calls "international words" (such as hotel, telephone) give learners access to "two or three thousand complex ideas" by being made part of their "learner's store". The word 'store' alludes, again, to the idea of 'investment for learning', which is closely connected with a more general idea concerning language pedagogy, namely

    iii) language as an instrument for thought and for learning

    These functions are particularly in evidence in Basic, and are referred to in the last part of the extract from Ogden (page 282 above) in the following way:

    • be clear and simple16
    • make Basic English part of the system of education in every country
    • less learning of languages . . .[because]. . . unnecessary waste of time.

    Here we come to issues which relate most directly to practical pedagogy. And it seems to me that with the benefit of 70 years' experience of language teaching since the heyday of Basic, this group of ideas may well be the most useful and productive for thinking about lingua franca teaching and communication for today.
        The key question, and one of particular pedagogic relevance, is what Ogden means by being "clear and simple". After all, these are crucial features of any language which is presented in class, since otherwise it cannot be accessed or learnt at all ; and most traditional ways of presenting and practising language are based on this principle : "This is a book. This is a pen."17 Ogden had long been researching into the influence of language on thought, a concern closely connected with the observations about Bentham's 'fictions' made above. As Catford puts it so succinctly,
    . . . the principles upon which Basic was founded naturally make the system an ideal instrument for clear statement and for keeping our minds free from errors induced by the misuse of words. The necessity for the expansion of many fictions, which the limited vocabulary imposes, and the need to symbolize our mental attitudes to things in separation from the things themselves, which arises from the absence of emotive terms in Basic, are powerful prophylactics against word-magic and are aids to clear thinking. Translation (from full English, or from any other language) into Basic is [...] a crucial test of the referential value of the original. What will not go into Basic may be nonsense - or it may be poetry. If it is the latter, the Basic parallel will help to show the reader exactly how the poet has produced his special effects. (Catford 1950: 46)
    It seems to me that what Catford is describing here, and what Ogden and Richards talked about very explicitly themselves, gets to the very heart of the concept of language awareness - a notion often evoked in current language teaching, though the meaning of the term itself is far from clear or stable (cf. Edmondson and House 1997). My own understanding of language awareness focuses on the ability to consciously reflect about the structure and functions of language, about what it can and what it cannot do, as opposed to competence in using a language as an instrument for communication. This, I believe, ties in closely with Richards' remark that from Basic words and rules "we can learn most about the nature, the resources, and the limitations of language in general" (1943: 25). This idea, however, sits uncomfortably with most contemporary language teaching policies and practices, which tend to aim at an instrumental pay-off in terms of practical communicative skills rather than long-term humanistic, pedagogic objectives, despite repeated declarations of educational ideals such as multilingualism and intercultural understanding. Such ideals surely need to be based on a deeper language awareness if they are to go beyond mere lip-service.18 As a result of this fairly short-term thinking, foreign language teaching in schools usually amounts to a large investment of time (often nine years or more) and resources (many specialist teachers of individual languages) into an educational undertaking which in many cases is doomed to failure, as most learners neither achieve a significantly heightened general language awareness nor really satisfactory communicative abilities in one foreign language, let alone in several. This state of affairs prompts Edmondson (1999) to argue very forcefully "Die fremdsprachliche Ausbildung kann nicht den Schulen uberlassen werden!" ["Foreign language teaching must not be left to schools!"].19 Interestingly for our purposes here, Edmondson acknowledges the special status of English as a lingua franca within foreign language teaching and recommends that all students should be given basic skills in ELF ; he emphasises, however, that this instruction should certainly not extend over nine years, as it so often does.
        The very next point Edmondson makes in his paper is that language awareness should become a school subject in its own right. While I strongly agree with both these recommendations, I would suggest that it would be even more desirable, and also feasible, to combine them as much as possible. It is precisely the status that English has as a lingua franca that creates a myriad of opportunities for learning about language awareness and intercultural communication - indeed, not to take these aspects into account would seem to ignore the very nature of lingua franca communication. This is because the very fact that ELF could be largely uncoupled from any specific primary cultural associations makes it a particularly good point of reference for the study of the way languages normally are inextricably bound up with such associations. Vollmer (2000: 14) seems to have something similar in mind when he says
    Structurally, lingua franca situations offer just as much educational potential as do those of a second language learner approximating to the protagonists of the target culture. What makes for the crucial difference is the additional undermining of learners' sense of security that is caused by the absence of a fixed, learnable system of linguistic meaning to fall back on. This is why lingua franca situations require greater effort and a more gradual and more complex negotiation in order to achieve an adequate and satisfactory form of 'self-explication'.   [my paraphrase, BS]
    And it is here, of course, where some familiarity with both philosophical and practical ideas of the Basic era would have much to offer to today's decision- makers. Talking about the teaching of English in India, for instance, Ogden and Richards make reference to the notion of time wasted in ultimately unsuccessful - because misconceived - language learning and underline the importance of "understanding of word-behaviour":
    With the efforts of educators to reduce the amount of energy at present wasted on the acquisition of foreign languages, which should henceforward be regarded as a technical speciality, supporters of Basic English are in full agreement. Basic itself is a valuable exercise in the understanding of word-behaviour. It forms an admirable introduction to that further study of the relations of thought and language which will prove a potent antidote to all forms of word-magic in the future. Its analytic structure makes it desirable for the learner to understand rather than to learn by rote; and at an early stage it can indicate the scope and internationality of the sciences as such. (Ogden and Richards 1938: 46)
    It seems to me that this extract relates closely to the important distinction which Edmondson and others make between 'communicative' and 'pedagogic' objectives. Even if the former should ever be reached, the point has been made that the achievement of the latter does not follow automatically from it. Or, as Richards so aptly put it a long time ago, "A man's ability to buy a hat in six languages does not in itself make him a better world citizen" (Richards 1943: 116). That is to say, even if our school systems did produce fluent speakers of one or the other foreign language, this would not ensure the development of an enhanced understanding of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural capabilities. Such an essentially metalinguistic understanding must, quite crucially, foster an appreciation in learners that communication should never be expected to be 'complete' or 'perfect' but always has by its very nature to make do with limited, imperfect resources, and that its success (or otherwise) is never a function of linguistic proficiency alone.20 These insights into the general nature of (intra- as well as intercultural) communication are reflected in the strategies for intercultural interaction outlined by Knapp (1987: 1034f.):
    Expect differences in ways of interacting. [. . .]
    Expect uncertainty. [. . .]
    Expect misunderstandings. [. . .]
        Knapp emphasizes that these strategies are relatively accessible to teaching and thus should constitute "important teaching objectives" (ibid.). If these objectives are ignored, a crucial potential of language education is likely to remain untapped. The resulting failure to help learners achieve metalinguistic under-standing has been very appropriately termed "Erziehung zur sprachlichen Dummheit" ("education in linguistic stupidity") by Gogolin (1999).
        In this respect, one might say that in spite of its claims to a communicative orientation, current language pedagogy remains 'code-fixated' in the sense that it may just develop an unthinking proficiency in abilities for use rather than an intrinsic awareness of the nature of the language itself and its creative potential. Again, Richards has pertinent things to say on this point:
    The language remains a mere means of repeating the same things in another code. And it is too often assumed that only an advanced knowledge of a language can be a liberating knowledge. That is a mistake; the liberation and enlargement of thought depend rather upon the how - with what understanding - the language is learned than upon how much of it is picked up. A small segment of a language, well learned with its meanings well explored, is more valuable - from this point of view, as allowing one to see how its thought patterns compare with those of one's vernacular - than a larger vocabulary learned as a code. (Richards 1943: 117)
    This again brings us back to the issue of 'investment' as discussed above. But there is another concern, the relevance of which will be readily recognized by many teachers. This is that education also has to somehow tackle the fact that today's age of globalisation is also an age of 'word-magic', of vacuous but persuasive sound-bytes, loosely associative, manipulatory hypertexts and spin- doctors . In this respect Routh's remark made in the 1940s is strikingly topical:
    After the war we shall all be arguing about reconstruction and self-direction, and invoking non-Basic expressions such as synthesis, sublimation, disarmament, ideology, transition and the subconscious self - all terms which are easier to pronounce than define. How many politicians would be reduced (in Gibbon's inimitable phrase) to "a silent blush or a scornful frown" if they had to translate into Basic the opinions conveniently veiled under the nomenclature of a dead language! (Routh 1944: 13)
    Conclusion and outlook

    What I have tried to do in this paper is to think through the implications of the changed and changing role of English as a lingua franca. I have argued that there is now a crucial need to actually describe what the features of such a lingua franca might be. Ogden's Basic English is relevant because from the criteria he himself specifies (in the passage from his 1935 book quoted on page 281f. above) one can infer, as I hope I have demonstrated, essential desiderata as points of reference for a description. It is clear that in reference to the criteria for an ELF model a) to d) that I sketched in the early part of this paper, Basic provides (explicitly, and by implication) a much more detailed set of features than those touched upon by Crystal and Quirk. Basic, whatever its shortcomings in practice, is highly significant as a stimulus for thought.
        What now needs to be done is to see how far Ogden's conceptual scheme relates to (the still very scarce) empirical findings of how people actually use English as a lingua franca. This paper, then, provides points of reference for a future programme of research aiming at establishing a broad empirical basis for the description of ELF.
        With this objective in mind, the compilation of a new corpus is now in progress at the University of Vienna. In the current initial phase, this project is supported by Oxford University Press and is therefore called the Vienna-Oxford ELF Corpus. For the time being, the focus is on unscripted (though partly pre-structured), largely face-to-face communication among fairly fluent speakers from a wide range of first language backgrounds whose primary and secondary education and socialisation did not take place in English. The speech events being captured include private and public dialogues, private and public group discussions and casual conversations, and one-to-one interviews, all of them judged to make use of ELF in a largely unselfconscious, instrumental (as opposed to identificatory) way. At least for the first phase, it was decided to operate with a narrow definition of ELF talk. That is to say, an attempt is made to meet the following additional criteria : no native speakers should be involved in the interaction, and the interaction should not take place in an environment where the predominant language is 'English', such as an 'Inner Circle', ENL country.
        It is hoped that this corpus will make it possible to take stock of how the speakers providing the data actually communicate through ELF, and to attempt a characterisation of how they use, or rather co-construct, 'English' to do so. As a first research focus, it seems desirable to investigate what (if anything), notwithstanding all the diversity, emerges as common features of ELF use, irrespective of speakers' first languages and levels of proficiency. Questions investigated will include the following : What seem to be the most relied-upon and successfully employed grammatical constructions and lexical choices? Are there aspects which contribute especially to smooth communication? What are the factors which tend to lead to 'ripples', misunderstandings or communication breakdown? Is the degree of approximation to a variety of L1 English always proportional to communicative success? Or are there commonly used constructions, lexical items and sound patterns which are ungrammatical in Standard L1 English but generally unproblematic in ELF communication? If so, can hypotheses be set up and tested concerning simplifications of L1 English which could constitute systematic features of ELF? The objective here, then, would be to establish something like an index of communicative redundancy, in the sense that many of the niceties of social behaviour associated with native-speaker models and identities might not be operable and certain native-speaker norms might be seen to be in suspense. Indeed, it may well be that situations occur in which 'unilateral' approximation to native speaker norms and expectations not shared in ELF interaction leads to communication problems, and that mutual accommodation is found to have greater importance for communicative effectiveness than 'correctness' or idiomaticity in ENL terms.
        In conducting these investigations, the large body of work already available on (native) language variation and change, nativised varieties, pidginisation and creolisation as well as on simplification in language pedagogy will be invaluable. And, of course, the considerable amount of conceptual work on English as an international language starting from the early decades of the twentieth century will be taken into account - notably Basic English (Ogden 1930, 1935) and West (1934, 1953).
        Once available, a description and codification of ELF use may well have important implications for curriculum design, textbooks and for how 'English' is taught for lingua franca purposes.
        As for the relevance of Basic English for formulating an ELF curriculum, it need hardly be said that I am not advocating that we should go into classrooms and teach Basic as described by Ogden. This would be ridiculous (without further research, anyway). But it would be equally ridiculous to disregard a great deal of work that has gone into conceptualising, operationalising and trialling a model of English which was designed from the outset as that of an international lingua franca. It is important to realise that Ogden was himself not primarily concerned with language pedagogy, and was indeed attacked by those who were. But as I hope to have shown, his work has important implications for language teaching and learning. In particular, it raises a matter of fundamental principle about the kind of language that is most effective in language education, not only for achieving proficiency for future language use, but for fostering an awareness of the nature of language itself, thereby linking practical pedagogy with more general educational considerations.


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    Footnotes 
     1 . In this paper, the discussion of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) will be limited to 
contexts where English is a foreign language (Kachru's (1992) Expanding Circle), not a 
second language or indigenised (= Outer Circle) variety. It should be emphasized, 
however, that the process of theorizing and empirical research which has been pioneered 
in Outer Circle varieties is of great potential relevance and benefit for the present 
discussion concerning Expanding Circle settings, (although this view is hardly ever 
expressed by Outer Circle scholars themselves). See also Kachru (1996) about the scope 
of ELF.

    2 . Not the slightest doubt about their 'ownership' of English seems to have arisen so far 
among the British public - witness this excerpt from the front page of not a tabloid but the 
quality Observer newspaper, written by its education correspondent:
"This week the Government will announce that the number of people with English as a 
second language has overtaken the number who speak it as their native tongue. [.] The 
British Council statistics have been seized on by Education and Employment Secretary 
David Blunkett, who will tell a meeting of business leaders on Tuesday to capitalise on 
their advantage as native speakers. [.] Insiders say the drive to make English the global 
lingua franca comes directly from Tony Blair." (Foreign tongues spread the English 
word. The Observer, 29.10.2000, page 1)  

    3 . See also Knapp's (1987: 1033) remark that in scientific writing "the tolerance of native
speakers for non-native varieties is extremely low".

    4 . The terms used throughout this paper for the roles of English in different countries are 
those frequently discussed by Kachru (e.g. 1992): Inner Circle (as a first language), Outer 
Circle (as an additional language), and Expanding Circle (as a foreign language).

    5 . With apologies to Gatwick Airport's slogan for its North Terminal: "the hub without the 
hubbub".

    6 . The following widely-used abbreviations are employed here: ELT: English language 
teaching; EFL: English as a foreign language; ENL: English as a native language. The 
acronym ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) is much newer, but its use has been spreading 
steadily in recent years.

    7 . Again, for Outer Circle varieties these questions have been addressed: see in particular 
Bamgbose (1998).

    8 . This 'conceptual gap' of ELF is discussed and documented in more detail in Seidlhofer 
(forthc.); as explained in Bamgbose (1998), the crucial criterion for recognition and 
acceptance is codification in dictionaries and grammars. And since ENL is the only kind 
of English whose codification is accessible all over the world (as opposed to that of 
indigenised varieties), ENL tends to be the default referent when people talk about 
'English'.

    9 . 'Teachability' and 'learnability' are not intended here in the specific technical sense they 
now have in second language acquisition research, ie concerning the order of teaching 
points in grammar instruction in line with empirically documented developmental 
sequences (cf. e.g. Pienemann 1989), but as objectives whose attainment can be furthered 
by the modification (i.e. 'simplification') of input for pedagogical purposes. These 
procedures of selection and grading of the language to be presented (grammar and lexis) 
for learning are likely to be informed by such notions as markedness and communicative 
redundancy.

    10 . For th-sounds, there is indeed empirical research available now suggesting that being able 
to pronounce them is not necessary for international intelligibility: Jenkins (2000) does 
not include /?/ and /?/ in her Lingua Franca Core, having shown that substitutions such 
as /f, v/, /s, z/ or /t,d/ do an equally good job in the lingua franca talk she investigated.

    11 . Note, however, that two years on, Crystal (1999) focuses on the issues of diversity, new 
hybrid forms and the need for empirical research.

    12 . Novial, an artificial language for international communication, was, like Esperanto, one 
of the candidates for an international language considered by the International Auxiliary 
Language Association.

    13 . For reasons of space, I shall not be able to go into detail about all the arguments that 
could be brought forward in each case, which may make some of my statements sound 
more provocative than intended - my hope is that this may encourage constructive 
engagement with some of the reasoning which follows.

    14 . Nevertheless, the journal The Basic News published by Ogden's Orthological Institute in 
the 1930s and 1940s occasionally printed poems written in Basic.

    15 . West and Swenson (1934) do pull Basic to pieces, but it is actually very factual and 
restrained in tone. This is not true, however, of some of the contributions grouped 
together under the heading 'Discussion Critical of Basic English' in Johnsen (1944).

    16 . Interestingly, this feature corresponds to Grice's (1975) fourth maxim of the Cooperative 
Principle - the only one, by the way, which has to do with the language as such. The 
point that might be made here is that Basic in this respect provides a guarantee for 
effective communication. 

    17 . One of the traditional problems of language pedagogy has always been how to simplify 
the language input for learning. This has generally involved 'denaturalising' actually 
occurring language in a somewhat adhoc fashion. Basic can be said to be a systematic 
'denaturalisation' which provides for such necessary simplification.

    18 . As Deborah Cameron's work makes clear (e.g. Cameron 2000), people can be constrained 
to follow effective communicative routines (especially in telephone call-centres and other 
service encounters) which are designed to suppress any individual sociocultural identity 
whatsoever. See also the review by Cook (2001).

    19 . This title, of course, echoes Vietor's famous 1882 pamphlet Der Sprachunterricht muá 
umkehren!

    20 . It is for this reason that Jenkins (2000) attributes great significance to the importance of 
accommodation (in the sense of Giles and Coupland 1991) in her work on the phonology 
of English as an international language.

    21 . This, of course, is the central concern of Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g. Fairclough 
1995, Wodak 1996). But it is interesting to note how this concern can be approached 
through the analysis of the language itself. Once more, one might claim, Basic takes us 
back to the basics.

    22 . For more on the Vienna-Oxford ELF Corpus and a rationale for a research programme, 
see Seidlhofer (forthc.). It is also interesting to note that James (2000) makes reference to 
a project, currently in its pilot phase, entitled 'English as a lingua franca in the Alpine-
Adriatic region'. One hypothesises that "one area stands out in which ELF might differ 
from 'native' forms of spoken English, namely the relative absence of figurative or 
idiomatic use". (James 2000: 35).