Intelligibility, accentedness and emotional attitudes in English as a lingua

No language has ever diversified as much as English has over the past 50 years. The driving force of this change is a shift in the sociolinguistic identity of its users. If one considers that English is predominately used now by ‘Non-Native Speakers’ (NNSs) to communicate with other NNS speech communities, a very different picture of the English language begins to immerge. This image has catalysed a paradigm shift away from theory cloaked in NS ideologies and questioned fundamental aspects of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Framed by a theory of foreign speech adaptation, this paper looks at three factors that may contribute to the misunderstandings that occur in the English as Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions of an Australian tertiary setting. The three independent variables are intelligibility, accentedness, and the emotional attitudes one has towards language variation. The preliminary findings suggest that listeners with a shared first language (SFL) background or typologically similar first language (TSFL) background to a speaker do not experience improved intelligibility. Similarly, participants with a SFL or TSFL background do not give lower ratings of accentedness. Furthermore, ratings of accent strength were found to be strongly correlated with intelligibility scores. Lastly, ELF users tend to classify emotional attitudes towards language variation into discrete categories, and that these attitudes are influenced more so by the perceived identity of the speaker rather than their speech quality. In sum, we have only begun to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the nature of ELF interactions.