Intercultural interactions in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) are increasingly becoming the norm as speakers of diverse first languages and cultures find themselves needing to communicate in both personal and professional domains for any number of reasons. The chapter provides an overview of ELF pragmatics research that is focused on how multilingual, multicultural speakers in real-world settings achieve mutual understanding through the effective use of ELF. Specifically, the chapter examines the pragmatic strategies that speakers deploy to preempt misunderstanding as they conjointly negotiate and construct shared meaning. Practices that enhance explicitness and clarity, such as repetition, rephrasing, topic negotiation, and the insertion of a parenthetical remark that provides additional information, reveal how speakers who anticipate difficulty in understanding, possibly arising from linguistic variability and cultural difference, increase efforts to minimize mis/non-understanding. Using data extracts from relevant ELF studies, the chapter illustrates how speakers in these intercultural interactions accommodate their interlocutors and the context of communication to arrive at shared understanding.

This chapter presents an overview of the main lingua francas of the world. The theoretical framework is Ecosystemic Linguistics, a branch of Ecolinguistics which sees language as communication or communicative interaction, not primarily as a system. The system does exist, but in order to facilitate understanding. It is shown that lingua francas such as Swahili, Fanakalo, Lingala, Kituba, and Sango (in Africa), Chinook Jargon, Mobilian Jargon, Nahuatl, Lingua Geral/Nheengatu, and Quechua (in the Americas), and Malay and Filipino (in Asia), among others, confirm this view of language. They are mainly used in situations of contact between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, in which case the main concern is with mutual understanding, not with the construction of grammatical sentences. It is also shown that one of the main causes of the emergence of lingua francas is colonization.

Andean linguistics has underestimated the role of states in the spreading of languages and dialectal fusion processes. This chapter deals with the spread of Quechua in the Inca and colonial eras. It first reconstructs the communicative functions performed by different varieties of this language in the Inca empire and brings to light the factors that determined the formation of koine varieties and their rapid diffusion. Mass migrations led by the Inca state have been the main factor in these processes of koineization. This chapter then shows how the colonial regime drastically intensified the centrifugal dynamics that have been exerted since the Inca era on the Andean communities, making the Spanish economic sphere (cities, mines, and haciendas) the focus of a new expansion and vernacularization of Quechua. Finally, it compares the historical-linguistic evolution of three Andean regions in colonial times (Ecuador, Central Peru and the Ayacucho region of Peru).

This chapter concerns the life-histories of lingua francas, languages adopted for communication among speakers who do not otherwise share a language. It recognizes four principal motives for developing a lingua franca: commerce, conquest, religious conversion, and cultural attraction. A lingua franca depends for its survival on the continuation in force of one or other of these motives, unless some user population adopts it as a mother-tongue, passing it on in the home, or dropping it for one purpose only to take it up afresh for another: this is Regeneration. Other paths, for decline of a lingua franca, include Ruin or Resignation, if the user community dissolves, and Relegation, if the use of the language is deliberately banned. In this framework, the careers of major languages (excluding European empires) are narrated: Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek in West Asia; Greek (again) and Latin in the Mediterranean and Europe; the sprouting and interaction of languages before European conquests in the Americas, and in Africa; Sanskrit, Persian, and later Malay in Southeast Asia, the interplay of Putonghua with other Chinese dialects across East Asia; and the rise of Hindi-Urdu in South Asia.

The story of Viktorija Ceginskas is a story of interactions between different ethnicities, cultures, and languages on the borders of the Baltic States. She shows how stateless refugees may compensate for their loss of identity by strong emotional bonds with families, native countries, and languages. She shows how "language use and practices help to determine a person’s self- and externally ascribed identification by others, and provide orientation in everyday social interactions, including the recognition as a valid and represented group member with specific rights.”

The purpose of the chapter is: first, to provide an overview of the socio-linguistic landscape of the late antique Mediterranean as a historical setting in which early Christian writers lived, worked, and developed their ideas on languages and religious identities; the linguistic and social practices they observed and experienced everyday set up an important context, even though their theoretical speculations may not directly reflect realities on the ground. Second, to briefly account for Christian encounters with foreign cultures and languages as the religion took off and to inquire into how the socio-linguistic situation in the ancient Mediterranean influenced the development of Christianity in its nascent stage and how Christianity in turn affected linguistic processes in the region. The spread of Christianity among various peoples and ethnic groups within and without the gradually disintegrating Roman empire was concurrent with complex formative processes within Christianity itself and took place amidst Trinitarian and Christological debates. The survey problematizes the role languages and linguistic distinctions played in these controversies and indicates several loci of potential tensions to be discussed further in the book (the alleged links between Punic speakers and Donatists, Germanic speakers and Arians, Syriac speakers and followers of non-Chalcedonian doctrines).

Chapter 9 is devoted to aspects of general extender use by second language (L2) learners, with discussion of research and examples from first language (L1) speakers of Dutch, French, German, Persian and Swedish, plus data from English L1 speakers learning other languages. The phenomenon of low-frequency use of discourse/pragmatic features among L2 learners is noted. The more limited repertoire of L2 learners results in the complete absence of some forms and a reliance on, and hence overuse of, only a few expressions. Another aspect of L2 learner usage is the creation of novel expressions, some of which can be analyzed as interlanguage forms. Novel forms, and new uses of old forms, are also exemplified in the use of English as a lingua franca. Proposals for the inclusion of general extenders in L2 teaching are based on the explicit presentation and analysis of examples, with a contrastive approach discussed and exemplified. The chapter concludes with four exercises designed to raise awareness of how different English general extenders are typically used.

The chapter introduces "World Englishes" as a topic of scholarly research and argues that the global spread of English is a fascinating but also a complex process, with a number of possible, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on and approaches to it. It is shown that nearly every speaker of English today has been exposed to different varieties of global English through media, travel, international contacts, and so on. It is argued that, based on their own linguistic backgrounds and more or less incidental cases of exposure to global varieties of English, proficient speakers of the language typically have intuitions on the sociosymbolic signaling functions of variant forms of English. Furthermore, it is shown that a wide range of sociostylistic information can be culled from any individual text. As a sample text, a Malaysian speech on a scientific subject is presented and discussed, pointing out some of its distinctive features on the levels of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Knowing more about such facts enriches our ability to assess, understand and contextualize Englishes from all around the world.