Describing Lexico-Grammatical Features of English as A Lingua Franca in Kurdistan and The Issue of Intelligibility

Abstract

Due to the widespread use of the English language, the number of non-native speakers has increased rapidly and lately exceeded the number of native speakers. Now the vast majority of communications are taking place among non-native speakers in international settings, often without the presence of native speakers. Consequently, this dominance of the English language has led to the emergence of a new conceptualization of using the language, which is that as a result of being used in international settings, new varieties of the language have emerged which might not necessarily conform to native-speaker standards. This is known as English as a lingua franca (ELF). The current study fills a gap in the literature by identifying systematically repeated lexical and grammatical features of proficient users of English in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The research compares against other ELF features previously identified in various contexts. The corpus of this study included data collected from both written and spoken interactions. A corpus of 42,094 words of authentic English use by 10 master’s students in one of the English-medium universities in the Kurdistan Region. The analysis resulted in identifying a number of deviations which were both similar and different from those found in previous studies. The results indicated deviations in the use of articles, prepositions, the third person singular –s, redundant marking and non-marking plural nouns, and verbs with high semantic generality. The findings of this research suggest that although a number of lexico-grammatical deviations occur systematically in the ELF in this context, their occurrences did not seem to impede intelligibility or the flow of communication amongst the participants.

Keywords

• english as a lingua franca (elf)
• lexical and grammatical features
• standard english
• non-native speaker deviations
• non-native users of english