Euro-English, an ‘Off-Shore’ Variety in the World of World Englishes

In the territory of Europe there is a European-English-using speech community: in such a situation, where English is used for intra-European communication and its users are neither the native speakers living in the UK nor the English speakers of one particular EU country, this community represents speakers of a non-native English that has been referred to as European English of Euro-English – an emerging variety with its own distinctive feature.Parallel to the multiculturalism and the linguistic diversity characterizing the EU countries, there is a common language – a variety of English that functions as a lingua franca in the European Union, as “the binding agent of a continent”.Despite the linguistic richness of the European Union and the 23 languages given official status, three languages dominate – English, German and French – both as those with the highest number of speakers and as the working languages of the European Commission. David Graddol (1997: 14) stated that Europe has become, as, Europe has transformed itself into “a single multilingual area, rather like India, where languages are hierarchically related in status. As in India, there may be many who are monolingual in a regional language, but those who speak one of the ‘big’ languages will have better access to material success”. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, however, a single one of these three “big” languages, has emerged – English, as the true “biggest” one, thus becoming the de facto European lingua franca. This fact does not mean, of course, that English can express the social identities of its European non-native speakers, even if it seems to be developing the scope “to express ‘emotional’ aspects of young people’s social identities” through phenomena such as code switching and code mixing: it is and arguably should remain the “language for communication” – with morphosyntactic, lexical, phonological an discoursal features of its own – whereas individual speakers’ mother tongues will remain their “language for identification”[...]