Abstract
This article explores the link between English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and super-diversity in the multilingual business context of a small IT company, where English is used as a lingua franca and various linguistic resources play an important role in the company practices. The aim of the study is to examine the practices, orientations to and use of ELF and multilingual resources within an ethnographically-oriented approach, with data collected through observations, interviews, focus groups and recordings of naturally-occurring interactions. The findings show that the company's practices are highly multilingual, whereby ‘languaging’ is a common and positively valued phenomenon. Results also show that ELF is highly collaborative, both in spoken and written communication, and the staff's sociolinguistic repertoire is sensitive to the interlocutors' communicative resources.
About the author
Alessia Cogo is lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Southampton. Before that, she worked and studied at King's College London, and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milano (Italy). She has written extensively on ELF pragmatics and the interface between ELF and multilingualism, and is also co-author with Martin Dewey of Analysing English as a lingua franca: A corpus-driven investigation (Continuum 2012).
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
