English as a Lingua Franca, The Decolonial Option in Migratory Contexts

The cultural turn in linguistic studies, begun in the 1980s, has led to a shift of focus from merely linguistic issues – centred on the study of words and/or texts – to the idea of language intended as an essential part of a broader cultural, literary, historical and ethical-anthropological system. More specifically, both the new and ongoing migration flows and older diasporas and colonial experiences point towards a gradual reconsideration of concepts such as language, translation, belonging, mobility, contact, nation, identity and community, as well as towards an analysis of the socio-linguistic and cultural implications for the countries on the receiving end. For the specific purposes of this research, the proposed reflection will lead to a deepening of the nature and role of the English language in its passage from hegemonic to contact language decreeing the end of monolingualism and the purist idea of language as an ideological construction, historically rooted and marked by the borders of the nation-state. From a strictly linguistic point of view, an illustrative example of this change might be the identification of authentic excerpts from oral conversations between migrants and intercultural mediators as case studies for translingual practices in ELF domains (Canagarajah, 2013; Guido, 2008; Vertovec 2007, Taronna 2015, 2016) and evidence for pragmalinguistic creativity (Widdowson 2017) within the same domain. For the purposes of our analysis, we considered a corpus of transcribed interactions in migration encounters (Centonze, 2019) which was pragmatically annotated by means of DART, i.e. a (semi-)automated software tool for the pragmatic annotation of speech acts. The ELF MIDO (English in Migration Domains) corpus provided examples of newly-emerging pragmatic functions for speech acts which re-consider already-existing categories in the light of creative uses of ELF in multicultural domains. The case studies which were considered for the purposes of our analysis have brought about not only to a re-consideration of the role of English in relation to multilingual practices as they emerge from the excerpts, but also to a re-consideration of approaches to the study and analysis of ELF variations in the light of corpus linguistics and corpus pragmatics. Indeed, the software tool itself, which constituted a frame to the study corpus, has undergone an intermediate phase of re-definition of the tagset, due to the multicultural nature of the data.