ELF authentication and accommodation strategies in cross-cultural immigration encounters

This paper explores the cognitive and communicative strategies involved in the use of ELF in situations of unequal encounters between non-western supplicants (i.e., African immigrants and asylum seekers) and western immigration officials in authority (in this case, Italian mediators – i.e., experts mediating between immigrants and institutions). Evidence from the case studies indicates that each contact group uses ELF with reference to different linguacultural conventions associated with their use of English, as the interactants come from the ‘outer’ and the ‘expanding’ circles respectively (cf. Kachru 1986). In consequence, each party in the encounters tends naturally to transfer the structural features and the meaning conventions of their L1 into the English that they use, each appropriating and ‘authenticating’ the language in accordance not with native speaker norms but with those of their own L1. Since these norms are not shared, there is the need for accommodation for communication to be achieved, but unequal power distribution in these encounters is not favourable to such accommodation – which, instead, normally obtains in relatively ‘equal’ encounters. The case studies show how the lack of recognition of these variable versions of English may have critical consequences in contexts involving political and ethical questions concerning human rights. It is contended that only a ‘mutual accommodation’ of variable usage would safeguard the participants’ social identities and foster successful communication in cross-cultural immigration encounters.