Making Sense of “Bad English”

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Elizabeth Peterson about language ideologies and what we think when we hear different varieties of English.

This episode’s conversation centers around Dr Peterson’s 2020 book Making Sense of “Bad English,” which is available open access. The book discusses how the notions of “good” versus “bad” English came about, and some of the consequences of these views of language.

The book is a must-use for teachers and professors who introduce their students to sociolinguistics as it contains discussion questions at the end of each chapter as well as recommendations for further reading. However, you don’t have to be a Linguistics student to enjoy this book. Making Sense of “Bad English” is for anyone who has ever wondered how it’s possible to have so many different varieties of one language, what the Standard Language Ideology has to do with Santa Clause, and why English spelling is so chaotic.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

If you like this episode, be sure to check out more Language on the Move resources about language ideologies here!

Episode Transcript

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Peterson. Elizabeth is a Senior University Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Today we are going to talk in general about her research into language ideologies, and in particular about her 2020 book entitled “Making Sense of ‘Bad English'”.

Elizabeth, welcome to the show, we’re so happy to have you here with us today.

Dr Peterson: Thank you for inviting me. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Brynn: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself? How did you become interested in linguistics in general and language ideologies in particular? And on that note, what exactly is a language ideology?

Dr Peterson: Ok, well, I’ll start with your first question, and a little bit about myself. I’m an American migrant to Finland. I’ve lived here for about 20 years. I did my PhD in the United States, and I live in a home with 3 languages – Finnish, Swedish and English. Finnish, of course, is the de facto and also the constitutional majority language in Finland, but Swedish is a constitutional language with about 300,000 speakers, and my family fits into that category. So, language is all around. You know, I’m a strong advocate of multilingualism, and those are the principles that we try to espouse in our home as well. Practice what you preach.

Brynn: I absolutely agree. In my house, we have not so much languages, we have two dialects. We have American English and Australian English. So, not so much the language spectrum but we definitely have words where we’ll say them and ask each other, “What do you mean by that? I don’t know that word.” Still, 15 years on in this multi-dialectal relationship.

Dr Peterson: Isn’t that incredible?

Brynn: I know, right? Can you tell us, for people who might not know, what is a language ideology? What do we mean when we say language ideology as linguists?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, well let’s start with what an ideology is. An ideology, at its most basic sense, means a belief that you have. So, there are many really good definitions of language ideology that are coming out of anthropology, pretty much, and then we kind of borrowed all of that into sociolinguistics. So, an ideology is a belief, therefore a language ideology is a belief about language. A really deep-seated belief. And this is a basic definition that comes from somebody like Michael Silverstein, for example.

There are many definitions that I like. I’ll kind of keep it brief today so it doesn’t turn into a classroom lecture. Nobody’s interested in that.

Another kind of nutshell definition that I like comes from the linguist James Milroy who says that it’s common-sense views about language. So, these are things that we kind of don’t question, and we just think that it’s always been there, that this is just the way it is, and therefore it makes it really, really difficult to turn that around and present it back to people in a way where they’re willing to go, “Oh! So, you mean that might not be an absolute truth? That this is just what I think?”.

So, truth, of course, is a really negotiable concept. Just because it’s what people think doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s complicated. That’s what we need to present back to people, that this is much more complicated than what they might think, and also link it to concepts and realities like language discrimination. They might not be able to make that link on their own, so that’s one thing we can do as linguists, is to make that link for them.

Brynn: That is such a good point that there really is that link between language ideologies and discrimination.

Dr Peterson: And it’s not a weak link, it’s a strong link!

Brynn: 100%, exactly. Exactly. And kind of on that note, one of the first things that we as sociolinguists learn is something called the Three Circles Model, proposed by Braj Kachru. That’s one of those Sociolinguistics 101 things that we learn. But not everyone that’s currently listening to us is a sociolinguist, so can you tell us what the Three Circles Model is and what it has to do with how people perceive different varieties of English?

Dr Peterson: Sure, and maybe I can start a little bit by just talking a little bit about who Braj Kachru was. He was from the Subcontinent. He was from Kashmir originally. He just died a few years ago. He grew up in a colonial setting speaking English as a second language. His idea with creating that model was to empower people from settings like that and not keep putting them down and saying that their English was somehow substandard or a learner variety or whatever, so it was a way of him taking ownership for people who come from that kind of demographic or geographical setting with a colonial history.

Anyway, I’ve presented this so many times in class. So, if you could visualise with me, if you will, 3 concentric circles. It looks like a bullseye with 3 circles, right? Kachru’s idea was that the Inner Circle, and that’s what he actually called it, the inner circle, is comprised of people who live in geographical territories where English is, you could consider it the mother tongue or native language for the vast majority of the population. And English is used in all domains, most domains anyway – family, maybe there’s always some exceptions, we all live in multilingual societies, that’s just the reality.

But anyway, you can see what I mean. It’s mostly English. And furthermore, the way English got to places that are included in that Inner Circle are places where we had settler colonialism. And that’s a key distinction there. It tends to be white people who came from Europe and brought the English language with them. They took over, settled there, and became dominant in many ways. So, this is what happened in Australia, this is what happened in the United States.

Furthermore, these people from the Inner Circle, because of the history that they have, they have the power in today’s world, and it’s been like this for many decades now, people would even say centuries, that they have power over the English language. There’s this sense that it really “belongs” to them, so we call this the “norm-providing” circle as well. I’m from the United States. Brynn, you’re from the United States. We have the privilege of being able to tell other people, “Oh, this is how you should speak English. Speak English like me.” So, we get jobs in Japan and Korea and stuff like that and nobody really questions it. It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, you’re the native speaker, you know everything about the language.” That’s the Inner Circle.

Let’s now contrast that with the Outer Circle. So, picture the ring, we’re moving on. There’s the next ring in the bullseye. That’s the Outer Circle, and these are places that have a colonial history. So, here we’re talking about real overt multilingualism, where English is an additional language which is usually formally acquired. That means they learn it in a classroom, sometimes from a very early age, but more often than not the home language is something different. Or there might even be 2 or 3 home languages. So, the Outer Circle is really characterised by strong multilingualism.

But English is considered this elite language that is learned in formal contexts, and it’s associated with, sort of this colonial history. So, power coming that way. Even though we wouldn’t necessarily consider this a “learner” variety because it’s so ingrained and it’s been there for so many centuries in some cases, there’s still this tension that, ok, do we look to the UK or the US to tell us how to use this English? And there’s a real divide that way. In some places they are looking for that model and in other Outer Circle settings it’s very much like, “Yeah, we got this, thanks. Thanks for giving us English. It’s our now. Just back off.”

Brynn: Exactly. I love that explanation, and I know that there is this real, like you said, tension between the circles that are in that bullseye, and this idea of “Who ‘owns’ English, and who does English belong to?”. Especially since it has become such a powerful language in the world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely. There’s still one more circle, if I could just briefly mention that, Brynn. And that’s the Expanding Circle, so that’s the outside ring. It’s called the Expanding Circle because that’s where a lot of the action is.

So, the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, those populations tend to stay pretty stable. I didn’t give any examples of Outer Circle varieties, I just realised that. Here we’re talking about places like Nigeria, India, Pakistan.

In the Expanding Circle we’re talking about the rest of the world. Those are folks who learned English as a foreign language, and even that is such a, kind of, nebulous, confusing concept in today’s world. Because here I am in Finland, and I tell you what, English doesn’t feel that foreign here in a lot of settings anymore. So, these labels, I really want to emphasise that they are not fixed. That’s actually one very big criticism of this model, that we have these labels in this way and understanding English. But it certainly doesn’t tell the whole story.

Brynn: Exactly. And that’s such a big point for us all to consider, that it’s not fixed. And it often feels like it’s becoming even more rapidly not fixed in this globalised world.

Dr Peterson: Absolutely, it’s all over the place. There have been several subsequent models, and I know some people consider this model a little bit old fashioned, but for this exact book what I wanted to do was set up this tension between these kinds of settings. I liked it more for, I guess you could say, a heuristic device, to just get people to think.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because, as a migrant to Finland and to Europe, it became very evident to me that there was this complete disconnect in many ways between what people in the Inner Circle think about English and what people in a setting like Finland think about English. I wanted to connect those dots for people about the ideologies in particular. So, this concept of the Three Circles Model became a way to do that.

Brynn: Absolutely, I absolutely agree. And, continuing on that, a lot of people who do speak English as their first and often only language, so the people in that Inner Circle that you were talking about, they might not be aware of something that’s called the Standard Language Ideology. Can you talk to us about what a Standard Language Ideology is, and in this case particularly in regard to English, and how it might manifest? What I love is that in this book you talk about what this ideology has to do with Santa Clause. Can you tell us about that?

Dr Peterson: Oh yeah, sure, thanks for that! I love that there’s a fan of the Santa Clause metaphor in the book. I wanted to make an analogy, so I chose Santa Clause. Let’s get to that in a moment. First, I’ll answer the first part of your question about Standard Language Ideology.

So, we talked about language ideology as basically just being deep-seated beliefs or common sense, everyday views about what language is and not really questioning what those beliefs are. So, a Standard Language Ideology means that people don’t question the standard. They kind of have this idea that it’s always been there. It’s kind of funny, as if it would have been some kind of divine origins, that it’s got some kind of supernatural force, that it’s always been there, intact and beautiful.

In the book, what I really wanted to point out was that we have these standard varieties of English which have cultural, historical, and social prestige in many ways. But it’s nowhere near the whole story. It’s only one variety of English, or some would say there are several standards. There’s a different standard in Australia than there is in the US, for example. Or different standards, even, plural.

But people who really, really espouse to this standard language culture, they tend to think that is the whole language. There is nothing else. And, when it comes to English in particular, come on! This is a language with, what, 1.5, 2 billion speakers in the world? The estimates vary a lot because we have to first define what it means to speak English, but that’s a different story. Do you really want to tell me that a language with up to 2 billion people has one variety and that’s a standard? Come on, you know? But people think it’s the only valid standard, and that’s what we should all be aiming to achieve. We should all talk like that. How boring that would be if everyone in fact did that!

It’s interesting and a little bit sad actually, to think about how English got to this status through exploitation and colonisation and so on. But what we have now is this treasure trove of varieties, and to try to think that we should all be speaking the same way and using English in one way – oh, how boring! How terrible! No, no, there is so much diversity, and you can celebrate that diversity, but that’s not enough. We need to also recognise that there are these divisions. I use the term linguistic discrimination about these different varieties. I kind of got ahead of myself, but I really wanted to emphasise that there are actual drawbacks and challenges to having this language ideology.

You asked in particular about the Santa Clause analogy that I used in the book. Thanks for bringing that up, and I will tell you that this was a contentious topic when I was proposing the book because the reviewers for the book were other academics, other linguists, of course. This book proposal was reviewed by 14 people if I remember right, something like that. A large majority of them said, “Really? You want to write about Santa Clause in a linguistics book?”. But I tell you what, Brynn, this was a book where I swallowed my academic ego because this book is for students. It’s for people who don’t know about Linguistics. I really wanted to bring it to a level that everyday people could understand and it would resonate. If I haven’t done that, then I haven’t done my job here.

So, I thought long and hard about what could be an analogy. So, you’re talking about, I think it’s Chapter 3 or Chapter 2 even. Anyway, I wanted to show that what we consider now as “standard” English actually has a birthplace in time and that what we consider the “standard” is man-made. It’s not divine. I use these words like there’s this idea that it’s divine and nobody can touch it. It’s this sacred thing. But it’s literally man-made, and I really do mean man-made, because it’s been the people in power, the people who have the most social power who have decided how we should speak, what’s considered correct, and it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of logical sense but it’s that way because they said it should be that way, these rules that we adhere to in Standard English.

So, I went back to any language that has a standardised variety, it’s always connected to having a written variety in that language, a written language. So, I took the history back to the printing press in the 1400s in London. I started there, and then went on about how spelling became fixed and so on and so on. And this is the same trajectory for any language that has a standard variety.

Anyway, I did the same kind of, let’s go back in history, because for me as a person from the US and somebody who comes from a Christian background, Christmas and Santa Clause – these kinds of things that we celebrate as families, they’re seen in the same way as, “Well, this is just what we do. It means so much, and this is our truth.” I compared it to folklore, actually, in the book. I have some nice quotes in there from folklore. We believe it because we think it’s the way it’s always been, but in fact, you can trace the thread back, and that’s what I did.

It was really fun research to go back and realise, “Oh, you mean our contemporary conception of Santa Clause only dates to the 1800s in New York City? What?!”. The red suit, the reindeer, all that, it literally dates back to one poem – “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”. Then it just exploded, just like the idea of a standard language ideology. So, getting students to make that connection, to realise that these are man-made phenomenon, and therefore they are not fixed. They are not divine, and we can do something about it. We don’t have to just accept this. We can question this. We can mold this ourselves.

Brynn: And that’s what I loved about the Santa ideology. And I loved how, in the book, as you said, it really is such a resource for not just students but teachers. Professors. Anyone who is teaching undergrad, or an intro to sociolinguistics course. And in the book, when you talk about the Santa Clause story, and how that then became the standard because of that poem, you also say, “And if this particular folklore doesn’t apply to you and your culture or to the standard language that you’re thinking of, think of anything else.” Because we all have these types of stories in any culture that then take off and become the “norm” that we all, like you said, don’t question.

Dr Peterson: I was concerned that that would be too Western-centric, and even the Christian overtones there with this Christmas thing. But in the end, I went with it. Thanks for bringing that up because I definitely don’t want to be exclusionary in any way. The same kind of concept could be applied to how you celebrate weddings or any kind of ritual. Any kind of holiday. Doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Jewish or whatever. Or any kind of social group or lifestyle that maybe you’re a part of.

Brynn: Anything where it feels like it’s just “always been”.

Dr Peterson: Exactly, that’s the point.

Brynn: I like that you just brought up the idea of us getting a Standard Language Ideology particularly when a language becomes written. In the book you do take care to point out that there are so many languages in the world that are not written, that are oral languages.

You have, I wrote it down, a quote in the book, and it says, “Indeed, there is a common fallacy that the ‘best’ speakers of English should speak English like it is written…In other words, a written form of a language is a prerequisite for standardization, which in turn is a prerequisite for prescriptivism about language.” I just think that’s such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially when we talk about prescriptivism and people saying, “Well you can’t say xyz because it’s not written like that.” But in the book, you do really take care to point out that there are so many languages that aren’t written and therefore don’t go through this standardisation process.

Dr Peterson: It’s really ridiculous that if you look at English spelling, and I think I say that in the book as well, that, “Really? You want me to pronounce this like it’s written? Are you sure?!”. English spelling is so chaotic. It was such a chaotic process really. It was so haphazard. I think it’s quite funny, actually, I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but the idea that being able to spell in English is a sign of intelligence and there’s these spelling been and everything? That means you can memorise really well, but there is no logic. There is no logic in English spelling. None.

Brynn: 100%. My background before I re-entered academia was as a teacher of English as a second or foreign language. And I often told my students, “Do not be upset that you’re not remembering how to spell these things. Remember that English is basically 4 languages standing on top of each other wearing a trench coat and it makes no sense. So definitely don’t feel bad if you can’t spell these absolutely bananas words in English.” They make no sense, I agree.

And kind of on that idea, thinking about people who are coming from those sort of Outer Circles, your book has a section called, “When ‘bad’ really means ‘foreign’”. Can you tell us about how and why people perceive someone’s English to be ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ and the deeper implications behind that judgment?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, great question, Brynn. I love this question. So, one thing that we know from a lot of research on sociolinguistics and language ideologies and also a connected area called language attitudes is that when we are judging other people’s languages, we’re putting ourselves in a position of superiority. We’re saying, “You need to be more like me.” It might be so hard to admit that, but if you tear back the layers or, like you just mentioned, you take off the trench coat, that’s what it is at its core.

So, the way we use language is such a beautiful manifestation of who we are as people. And it tells all these social cues, you know, within seconds of hearing somebody’s voice. Research backs me up on this. You are doing statistics in your brain. You’re thinking, “Where is this person from? How old are they? What’s their gender? How educated are they? What kind of work do they do?”. It’s incredible, but you’re mapping onto the templates in your head all this information about people.

So, what this means, if you peel back the layers, we’re taking one of these beautiful, beautiful things we have as humans, not only to express our thoughts and contents of what we do, but who we are as people. When you’re judging somebody’s language because they sound foreign, maybe because they sound like they might be Native American or African American or whatever, all this information, a young person, a woman, whatever, that you’re actually judging that person. If you then take it further and say, “You’re a young girl and you shouldn’t talk like this,” you’re actually not saying something about the language, but you’re saying something about young girls and your biases towards them. So that’s a really important point to make, that when we say somebody’s “talking wrong” we might think we’re doing them a favour, like, “Oh, let me help you,” but what you’re really saying is, “I’m judging you as a person, and I don’t think that you’re good enough.” That’s the core message there.

You asked specifically about people who are foreign, so here we’re talking about people who speak English with an accent that clearly marks them as speaking English as a second language. So, ok, what did I just talk about? What we’re doing is we’re saying, “Oh, you’re not one of us.” It’s xenophobic, really. It’s racist. And we cushion that by saying, “Oh, but I’m trying to help you”.

I think there are different ways of helping people, and when I teach in the class, I call it “giving someone the hand linguistically. As a migrant myself in Finland, I feel this very deeply. My Finnish clearly marks me as a foreigner. Sometimes people literally do give you the hand when you try to speak Finnish, and it feels so bad.

There’s this famous line from this American comedy, Modern Family, with Sophia Vergara. And she has this famous line, “You have NO idea how smart I am in Spanish!”. And that’s how it is, like please recognise that this is a whole person in their native language. Instead of putting that person down and saying, “Why can’t you speak proper English?”, maybe this person speaks Punjabi and Hindi and you don’t even know what else. Like, let’s respect that and the fact that they’re trying to communicate with you in your mother tongue. Let’s applaud that instead of making the person feel terrible about it. So, that’s what it comes down to. It becomes a form of xenophobia and colonialism in your own setting, like, “You don’t speak English right, let me tell you.”

Brynn: Yes, absolutely. That has so much impact, I think, on the field that I came from, which is teaching English as a second or foreign language. In my experience, because I would teach adults, I would often get students who would ask me for advice on “accent reduction”. They would say, “Can I go to a class to reduce my accent?”, and I would always tell them no because I have an accent in my second language, which is Spanish, because of the muscles in my mouth. Because of the way that I was raised speaking English, these were the inputs that I got at such an early age, and I don’t want to take away the accent that marks me as who I am. There is nothing wrong with having “an accent” because every single one of us has an accent.

Something I heard once from someone, and I wish I could remember who said this because I would love to attribute this to them, is that it’s important that when you talk to someone, if you recognise that they are speaking your language as an additional language, so maybe that’s not the language that they were raised with, when you hear their accent think about how their mother sang lullabies to them as a baby, and how they learned their language starting that way. They learned how to move their mouth listening to their mother sing to them. The muscles in their mouth formed that way, and that’s what eventually leads to an accent. And there’s nothing wrong with that. All it shows is that we’ve been taught language by the people who cared for us.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, I think that’s a really beautiful way to look at that.

Brynn: I’ll have to find out who said that, and I will tell you. So let’s talk about some of the factors that influence language. Your book discusses several explanations posited for the existence of distinct dialects of English. What are those, in brief, explanations and how do they combine in ways that cause us to make judgments about someone’s use of a language, in this case English?

Dr Peterson: I’ll maybe answer the last part of the question first. What causes us to make judgments – like I just said, it assumes a position of power and authority. Like, “Oh, I’m so important and I think I’m better than you, so I think I have the right to tell you how you should be speaking.” Something as innate, as essential to the human condition as language. Let me just tell you how you should be doing that. You’re doing it wrong. It has the risk of cutting to the very heart of somebody. Like you just said, the lullabies that your parents sing to you, and then somebody at school or in different more formal settings outside the home say, “The way you talk at home is wrong.” What does that do to a child or a person, when you rip away at this very intimate and core part of somebody’s identity? It can be very potentially damaging to people, and I think it’s time that we faced that reality.

You asked about some of the explanations, and the reason I included this chapter in the book where I talked about these explanations was because I had spent so much time in the previous chapters talking about why there’s a standard variety and what it means and what are the drawbacks of that, what are the reasons why languages have a standard.

But I wanted to make it clear, you know, if there’s so much push for us all to be speaking some kind of standard variety, then why do we have so much variation? Why don’t dialects die out? And they never will because we’re very different as people. It was a difficult mental exercise, and I know there could be many other explanations, but the explanations that I thought long and hard about and ultimately wrote in the book were 3 different areas.

The first is what I call access and isolation. I talk about prestige, particularly what has been called covert prestige. That means, like, in-group prestige. It might not be prestigious at different levels of society, especially formal, top-down levels of society. I think this is actually the most important, this third concept which is identity and group identity. These factors, as you pointed out in your question, they interact in many ways.

I come from the setting of the US. The examples that I have in the book draw largely from the US, so I’ll stick with those examples. In the United States, we no longer have official segregation, not official, but there is definitely de facto segregation. You see this in pretty much every major US city, and the situation does not improve. You have really start differences. You can literally cross the street – I used to live in Washington DC –

Brynn: I did too!

Dr Peterson: Oh, that’s interesting! So, you know this, you remember this. Did you ever go to Southeast? I never went there once.

Brynn: I never went there, but I know that area, and you’re absolutely right. The difference between just two streets – one street and the street next to it – was stark.

Dr Peterson: And that’s in the nation’s capital. It’s just so grim and so stark, like you said. So, this access and isolation, and by access what I mean is access to socioeconomic factors like, I talked in the book about housing, education. So, this is de facto segregation. It goes on and it ties to socioeconomic status.

So, if you look at statistics from the United States, I believe it was John Law who said that this is pretty much in any developed society, we see the same kind of trend. Very unfortunate trends, that race and ethnicity tend to be intertwined with a lower socioeconomic status and less socioeconomic advantage. You might have the idea from the outside looking in of, “Well, why don’t you just better yourselves? Why don’t you just pick up and move on?” But how do you do that if you have this extreme cycle of poverty and disadvantage and this is your everyday life? It takes money, it takes ties to the outside world. It takes support to be able to pick up and leave. I think it’s quite shocking, actually, to have to acknowledge how isolated certain speech communities really are, even in the middle of a big city like Washington DC.

Then this obviously ties into these factors like prestige. If your day-to-day life is the people around you, you know, your family, your friends who live in this community with you, there are of course going to be norms of linguistic prestige within that community itself that are very specific to that community because that’s the day-to-day reality. It has nothing to do with what’s happening in rooms where there’s important white people or whatever, whichever way you want to envision it. This, in turn, of course, leads to an enormous sense of identity about who we are.

So, you can really see how these 3 factors can intertwine. I thought these were quite important factors. Of course, there might be others. I would be happy to hear what other people would think would be some of the major reasons for why such extremely non-mainstream or non-standardised varieties continue to exist. But the key reason that keeps coming out again and again is because they mean so much to the people who speak them. They’re such a huge part of the identity, and why would you possibly want to take that away? It tells the story of who they are, and who their parents were, and so on.

Brynn: And who sang them lullabies, exactly.

Dr Peterson: Yeah, and who sang them lullabies.

Brynn: Exactly, and on that, thinking about this idea of standardisation and especially English – in the past 25 years, English has truly kind of exploded. It’s often been referred to as a lingua franca in today’s world. What is a lingua franca, for people who might not know, and what does this view of English have to do with the way that, kind of as we were talking about before, English as a second or a foreign language has been or is taught?

Dr Peterson: Yeah, ok, great question, and this certainly ties in with your previous career. A lingua franca means some kind of a vehicular language, a language that you try to use to find common ground when you don’t share a mother tongue or maybe even a second language. In today’s work, this has become English because English is just there.

I talked earlier about how Finland is an officially bilingual country, constitutionally bilingual. You might be shocked to find out that it’s increasingly common for Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers here in Finland to speak English with each other. I understand that the same thing is happening to Belgium as well, another officially bilingual country, trilingual actually. So yeah, multilingual Europe, there we go. Does it really mean just speaking English in addition to the other languages? But anyway, that’s what English as a lingua franca is. It means that English has emerged as this language that people can use as a medium of communication when there is no other logical choice available.

You asked how it compares to English as a second language or a foreign language, and it does differ in very important ways. One of the things that I really appreciate, we call this the ELF movement, not to be confused with small people, or people from Lord of the Rings or whatever.

So, we do call it ELF, and it stands for English as a Lingua Franca, and it differs in its ideology very, very much from second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. In English as a Lingua Franca, the principle is that it’s something that people have. You’re a user of English as a Lingua Franca, an ELF speaker, but you’re not an ELF learner. It’s not something that is, “Ok, you need to do this and this and this to speak it well.” That’s more tied up with the principles of English as a second language.

But English as a lingua franca, the principles are that people have their language background. You might be a German speaker and then you speak English as an additional language, and you meet somebody from, I don’t know, Taiwan. Then they merge, and each one will bring characteristics from their mother tongue, and it’s not seen as being error-based.

I remember studying second language acquisition when I was in graduate school in the United States. There were all these error-based models and, you know, here’s the native speaker norm, and let’s compare it. The second language speaker got this wrong and this wrong and this wrong. We were always talking about mistakes and errors, and it was a really prescriptivist view is what we would call that.

But with English as lingua franca, it’s just “look, this is what this person brings in and this is what this person brings in,” and somehow, they manage. I really appreciate that the ELF research is trying to celebrate what a success story this tends to be. You think of it as bringing out the goodness in people. People want to communicate, so they’re trying to find common ground. They’re trying to understand each other, and nobody’s really in a position of authority.

Another thing that characterises ELF conversations is that native speakers like you or me, we wouldn’t necessarily have an advantage. We would be another ELF speaker, and we wouldn’t be able to say, “Oh, well I speak English right. You should gravitate towards me.” The research shows that very often, people who are using English as a lingua franca, they understand each other, especially if they have a shared language background, they understand each other certainly better than they would understand someone from Glasgow or Aberdeen or, you know, inner Baltimore or whatever.

Brynn: Or Outback, Australia. Yes, exactly. That is what is so interesting to me, especially coming from a background of teaching English as a second and sometimes I taught as a foreign language, and just seeing the ways that people naturally were able to understand each other. It was almost like watching language evolve in real time. I think that’s just so fascinating and, like you said, that’s something to really be celebrated because, as humans we’re able to do that. And how awesome is that? And, like you said, it’s not about prescriptivism or errors, it’s about saying, “Wow, look at them! We can communicate with each other and potentially make something new.”

Dr Peterson: It’s about ownership, and it’s important to point out that we as lecturers, as scientists, as teachers of English, we’re victim to our own ideologies. And that’s an ideology that just did a complete pivot.

Brynn: It really is. I’d like to ask you the following question because I ask this to other guests that we have on the show. What do you feel is something that generally monolingual English speakers get wrong, just kind of in general, when they think about people from non-English speaking backgrounds who learn to speak English?

Dr Peterson: This ties in with something we talked about before – giving somebody the hand. We tend to associate language with thought, and this is what a lot of people who are interested in linguistics as lay people, they really think that there’s this widespread popular belief that we think through language. So, therefore, if somebody has a learner way of speaking English, we somehow think that they’re not a whole person or that they’re maybe kind of stupid or they can’t think straight. That’s so belittling. Do you see what I mean? That if, you know, this person can’t speak my language correctly, if somebody really has that standard language ideology, they think English should only be spoken this way, and then here’s somebody who’s trying to communicate and use English that they’ve learned later in life. That you might not value what that person has to say and just think that this person has no credibility, this person’s stupid. They can’t even speak. Not recognising that this person has a rich linguistic repertoire. Everybody has a full language capability in their mother tongue. I think that’s something really important.

What else could I say? I think that, very often, because of these ideologies that native speakers have, people from the inner circle, they don’t question the English language in the same way that people do who have acquired it later in life or through different means. So, we have all kinds of inaccurate things that we believe about the English language in particular that just don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Like, when I’ve been visiting North Carolina, that’s what I wrote this book actually, it was wonderful. Somebody there told me that, “Did you know that they speak like Shakespeare here in the Appalachian Mountains?”, and I was like, no they don’t. “Yeah, they do! There’s these communities there and they speak Shakespeare’s English there because it’s so isolated!”. Nah. So just these folk ideas that say a lot, but they don’t necessarily say truths about language. Those are always interesting to hear.

I think we touched on something previously as well when we talked about English as a lingua franca, and that is that standard English would somehow be logical or superior or easier to understand. That’s not the case either, as we’ve discussed, not necessarily true, that those are just other varieties that have more social prestige for some people. That’s the only thing that makes them special. Those are the important things that come to my mind.

Brynn: Honestly, I agree. And I think it’s worth coming back to that image of the four languages standing on top of each other in a trench coat when we think about people who do learn English, especially later in life. Truly, English, when we think about it, is just such a hodgepodge of other languages, of other influences. You can see the history that has happened within English, and to expect people to be able to do all of that as they learn English, to be able to do everything “correctly”, when we think about how difficult English can be – you’re right, it’s not fair and it demeans them as a whole person.

Dr Peterson: And have you noticed as well that sometimes you get the feeling that it’s never enough? The carrot is dangled ever higher. Ok, you can do that, but you still don’t sound like this person.

Even as native speakers, we’re forced to kind of achieve this impossible target, and native speakers can certainly have those insecurities. Studies from Americans showing, “Oh I don’t speak good English, they speak better English in Britain.” I mentioned that in Chapter 1 of the book. This insecurity that even somebody who has English as their mother tongue, this is what standard language ideology does to people.

Brynn: Exactly, and before we wrap up, I could talk to you forever but I guess we do have to wrap up eventually. Can you tell us what’s next for you and your work?

Dr Peterson: Yeah! I love this question. I’m really excited to tell you about a project that I’ve had for a few months now which is called Language Awareness and Ideologies in Finland. It’s funded by the Kone Foundation which is a private foundation based in Finland. Even in Australia, though, you might see lifts and escalators made by this company.

We have this project funded by them, and you could say that this book was really a stepping stone for me, and we certainly see this movement in linguistics, and sociolinguistics in particular. And you folks there, you’re doing such wonderful work. Anyway, the Kone Foundation is “make the world a better place”, and I love that. The way our project runs is we want to make the world a better place through language.

We’re working on addressing the tension and the fear that people feel in Finland about the Finnish language being at risk because of the input of English. This is a real fear with these language communities here in Europe and elsewhere, of course. We’re dealing with this in Finland. I have some brilliant postdocs, a PhD researcher, and one thing that makes our project stand out is that we have a dedicated science communicator, a public relations person, who is making that liaison between our science and the public. We’re hearing more and more about how we need to do this, build in social impact.

So yeah, we’re getting going with the project and it’s really exciting to have that. As I said before, just pointing out the richness of English is not enough. It’s time to redress the social injustices. I feel like we’re part of a larger movement. There’s lots of folks in the US, Australia and so on who are really trying to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak, with our science and making the world a better place through language. So that’s what’s up. Get out of the lab and out of the ivory tower and talk to people! Get our message out there, what we have known about language for decades.

I also have a new book on the topic. It’s called “English in the Nordic Countries”. That’s open access. It’s an anthology, so chapters that are talking about this tension and these challenges that the Nordic countries in particular seem to feel is such a problem now, how do we protect Icelandic, how do we protect Danish and so on, when English is making such inroads into all these different levels of society. So that’s what I’ve been up to. Lots of exciting stuff. It’s so fun to be a linguist!

Brynn: That sounds absolutely fascinating! I cannot wait to follow your work and to just kind of see how you keep going. It sounds wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, and it’s just been an absolute delight to talk to you.

Dr Peterson: I feel the same way. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Brynn: Thank you! And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!