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.
Vanessa Piccoli, Rosa Pugliese (2022). Laughing at English. 'The' lingua franca at the interface between local-interactional resistance and cultural-societal pressure. LANGUAGE AND DIALOGUE, 3, 360-382.
Laughing at English. 'The' lingua franca at the interface between local-interactional resistance and cultural-societal pressure
Rosa Pugliese
2022
Abstract
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.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.