Laughing at English

The lingua franca at the interface between local-interactional resistance and cultural-societal pressure

Bibliographic Data

ID22342191
AuthorsVanessa Piccoli (0000-0001-9554-8893, Université Paris Nanterre), Rosa Pugliese (University of Bologna)
Year2022
Volume12
Issue3
Pages360-382
Publication date2022-10-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage and Dialogue (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2210-4119 • E-ISSN: 2210-4127
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/ld.00134.pic
OpenAlexW4297376657
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited49

This contribution explores the stances of speakers of Romance languages towards the use of English as a lingua franca in a business context. Grounding on an audio-visual corpus collected in a wine fair in France, the analysis focuses on three extracts where participants comment in a playful way (i.e. through laughing, joking and humorous enactments) upon the fact that they are not speaking English. Through a sequential and multimodal analysis, the study will highlight the participants’ ambivalent stance: on the one hand, through these playful practices they display a local resistance towards the mainstream language choice; on the other hand, these same practices reveal their vulnerability to the social pressure concerning the speaking of English

Ambivalence · English as a lingua franca · Lingua franca · Linguistics · Mainstream · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Sociology · Varieties of English · Computer Science · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology · Second Language Learning and Teaching · Social Psychology

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