In this chapter I examine the statistical effect of industrialization on ethnic change. I first take Soviet-era cross-national data measuring ethnic diversity by country in 1961 and 1985 and regress the change in ethnic diversity across these twenty-four years on change in carbon emissions per capita over the same time period. The results demonstrate a strong relationship between decreasing ethnic diversity and increasing levels of industrialization, a result which is robust to the inclusion of several control variables and the use of various sub-samples, as well as alternative measures of industrialization such as cement production and urbanization. I also show that carbon emissions are robustly correlated with change in the percentage identifying with the largest ethnic group per state. I then use an alternative original dataset consisting of individual country censuses between 1960 and 2019, and show that the same effect holds, both as regards the effect of carbon emissions on ethnic fractionalization as well as robustness checks and multiple alternative measures such as electricity consumption and the share of labour in both agriculture and industry.

Here I provide an overview of the concepts of ethnicity and industrialization. I first define ethnic groups as descent-based groups and show how vertical ethnic change can take place, both through the consolidation of smaller ethnic groups into larger ones as well as assimilation into a national identity. The chapter also discusses why the book focusses on what I call vertical ethnic change instead of horizontal ethnic change, namely because the former is far more prevalent than the latter. I then provide a similar overview of the concept of industrialization, by focussing on how industrialization has historically involved a shift in the focus of the economy from rural agriculture to urban employment and from land to labour as the predominant factor of production. I justify my use of carbon emissions as my predominant cross-national quantitative measure of industrialization and my use of urbanization as my main proxy for industrialization for regions or communities within countries.

Worldwide communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is enacted between people from different linguacultural backgrounds, so it would seem self-evident that it is inter cultural in its very nature. Pragmatically, however, it is not essentially different from “monolingual” / “intracultural” communication. In both cases, participants have to bring their diverse linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions into convergence on common ground. To conceive of this diversity as relating only to different named languages and the cultures associated with them is to disregard the vast variation in linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions that obtains within so-called monolingual communities. So to describe the use of ELF as exceptionally multilingual and intercultural is to misrepresent it as a distinct way of communicating. What makes ELF distinctive, and a significant area of study, is not that it is a different kind of communication, but on the contrary, that it so clearly brings out how communication works in general: since the degree of linguistic and schematic disparity between participants is likely to increase the challenge of convergence, the pragmatic process of achieving convergence will naturally become particularly apparent.

This chapter explores the role of translanguaging in ELF advice practices at a UK charity supporting refugees and asylum seekers. Previous research has highlighted how multilingualism is an essential aspect of ELF (Jenkins 2015), and the role of multilingual resources has received increased attention in the latest conceptualizations and linguistic analysis. However, the contribution and nature of multilingualism in relation to ELF need to be investigated further. This study addresses the role of translanguaging in high-stakes ELF environments, such as advice sessions for refugees and asylum seekers.In this chapter, I first explore the notion of translanguaging and then explain the linguistic ethnographic approach taken to collect and analyse the data. The qualitative analysis of the data shows the complexity of advice practices in relation to the use of multilingual resources in ELF, and demonstrates how translanguaging can be used for at least three functions: pedagogical, explanatory and interpersonal.

The Standard English third-person singular -s of present-tense verbs may not be of much consequence in international communication today, but its history reveals interesting parallels with processes that are typical of ELF. Drawing on research on historical corpora and databases, this chapter draws attention to the fact that Standard English is an accumulation of features that were adopted by speakers of English in different periods and from a variety of origins – just as in English used in international communication today, but by a smaller speaker population and from a more limited feature pool. The case study traces the spread of verbal -s back to Late Middle and Early Modern English, and reconstructs the processes that it underwent regionally and socially, and from speech to writing. The alternative expressions that could have been selected instead include the suffixless variant, commonly found in ELF today.

In Chapter 6, the author explores the interface between English as a lingua franca (ELF) and good language teaching and presents the findings of a small-scale exploration into teachers’ perceptions of ELF.

In the introduction I argue that it is difficult to understand how language is acquired, processed or used by examining single words. We immediately run into problems of implausible cognitive processing loads of constructing language word by word and inescapable ambiguity any text must be creating. Thus phraseological approaches to language seem to give more promise. This book focuses on one approach, known as the idiom principle, proposed by John Sinclair. The approach is applied to second language learners of English who are often claimed to be restricted in their ability to operate on the idiom principle. The introduction situates this topic in a broader context of current interests in linguistic and psycholinguistic inquiry and explains how it is related to such concepts as chunking, statistical learning, implicit and explicit processing, ad hoc concepts and L2 or LX user.