English as a Lingua Franca: Negotiating Identity in Cross-cultural Encounters between Native and Non-native Speakers

The aim of the present paper is to provide a characterization of how non-native speakers negotiate their own identity and try to establish themselves as language users rather than as language learners, on occasion of cross-cultural encounters. Taking into account a series of interviews and a panel discussion recorded from BBC World and CNN International, the study will claim that, in international encounters, when English constitutes the main or only means of communication and the primary preoccupation is mutual intelligibility, it is advisable to introduce the notion of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), rather than refer to the yardstick of ENL (English as a Native Language). The evidence collected will show that non-native speakers can engage in conversations that are not only meaningful but also ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ (Firth 1996). Even though the corpus of data gathered for the purpose of this work is not very large and cannot claim to provide an exhaustive description of the uses of English as a lingua franca, it can show how non-native speakers successfully negotiate meaning, as well as their own identity, and get their interlocutors (mainly native-speakers) to accept them as ELF speakers rather than EFL learners.