Premium
Patterns of change in English as a lingua franca in the UAE
Author(s) -
Boyle Ronald
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/j.1473-4192.2010.00262.x
Subject(s) - lingua franca , linguistics , english as a lingua franca , transitive relation , complement (music) , sociology , political science , mathematics , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , combinatorics , complementation , gene , phenotype
As foreign workers constitute about 90 per cent of the workforce of the UAE, English is used as the country's acrolectal lingua franca. In order to discover what effect this community of multilingual speakers is having on the lexicogrammar of English, a million‐word corpus of examples of formal, written English as a lingua franca (ELF) was compiled, and was compared with data from the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus. The results suggest that the patterns of use of non‐finite complement clauses and of transitive and intransitive verbs, in particular, are beginning to change and that the changes are systematic. Where a choice of patterns exists, ELF usage appears to be converging on the dominant pattern.