Question 3. What is the community the L2 user belongs to?

We can now turn to the community that L2 users belong to. In language-related research language is assumed to be a crucial feature of one’s identity as a member of a community: Pennycook (1994) says ‘Anything we might want to call a language is not a pre-given system but a will to community.’ It should perhaps be remembered that language is not necessarily criterial to a community as in the historical case of Jewish communities speaking diverse languages (Myhill 2003): it is one of the core values of the community but not the only one (Smolicz et al. 2003).

The overall issue is whether the language communities formed by L2 users are distinct from those of monolinguals. English has an international L2 user community of people across the world for which the native speaker community is virtually irrelevant; it is the interaction of academics, businessmen, tourists and others with each other and with non-native communities that matters. Global English, International English, English as Lingua Franca (Jenkins 2006), whatever these different concepts amount to, they demonstrate the existence of a widespread L2 user community. Having two languages makes people part of a different language community, not just a minority group with an added language but what Brutt-Griffler (2002) terms the ‘multi-competence of the community’. This section attempts to pin down some of the different communities to which L2 users may belong. These compartments are far from watertight and are obviously open-ended.

- the community of native speakers – first language

The least problematic community for most people is native speakers using their first language: L1 monolinguals and L2 users alike have a first language and belong to the community of its L1 users, remembering the caveats about the homogenous community mentioned above. So the native speakers of English in Newcastle-upon-Tyne can speak with each other and with anybody else in the wider English-speaking community. But a community of native speakers may also be an island within a sea of another language; the resident Chinese community in Newcastle speak Cantonese amongst themselves as L1 native speakers. Native speakerdom is not forfeited because the community is the minority rather than the majority group. And of course many native speakers may be L2 users rather than monolinguals. We can call this the first language community. Ideas both of assimilation of speakers of other languages into the majority community and of ethnic minority groups sharing a language rely on the first language community as the only true language community. But is it the only language community?

- the community of minority language speakers communicating with the majority – service language

Many people also have to speak a different language from their first language with the majority group in their setting, say resident Turks in Berlin using German for their everyday contacts with the German-speaking majority or Bengalis living in the East End of London. Their first language is spoken and used by an established resident community. Nevertheless most of them have to use the second language for dealing with the rest of the society around them. They constitute a multi-competent L2 user community as well as an L1 community. Their use of the second language makes them a member of a new community with an L1 for some purposes and an L2 for others, thus distinguishing them from the ‘pure’ monolingual community. The second language is being used for practical purposes – the classic ‘second language’ situation. We can call this a service language community.

- the community of minority language speakers communicating with other minority language speakers – cooperation language

Additionally most cities of the world now have, not just isolated groups of service language users, but also permanent communities of L2 users who use the majority language to mix with each other faute de mieux. London has speakers of 300 first languages, most of whom will be using English to talk to other people (Baker & Eversley 2000). The second language is functioning as a local lingua franca, sometimes with legal status, such as English as a national language of India. This language is not necessarily the language of the majority community in the country, as with Swahili in many African countries (770 thousand native speakers, 30 million lingua franca speakers) (Gordon 2005). We can call this a cooperation language.

- the community of minority speakers (re)-acquiring the minority language – identity language

Another community of L2 users consists of people descended from a particular group learning the language of their historical origin – language maintenance or heritage. In Singapore, English has been the official first language in the schools for some time; children now attend classes in their mother tongues whether Mandarin, Tamil or Bahasa Malaysia. Language maintenance classes take place in most places, in Newcastle for Chinese for example. These people do not necessarily need the second language for practical everyday purposes so much as for identification with their roots, as in the Chinese people learning Mandarin in Confucian Institutes around the world. We can call this an identity language. A sub-category are returnees – children or adults going back to the country they or their family originally came from having to re-acquire the language of the homeland, whether Japanese expat children returning to Japan (Kanno 2000) or Puerto Ricans returning from the US to Puerto Rico (Clachar 1997).

- the community of short-term visitors to a country – visitor language

The language communities seen so far are geographically based in one location, whether an island within the society or the surrounding sea. But people also form mobile communities by going to countries where they have to speak another language: they are incomers for temporary or permanent stays. These short-term visitors include inter alia: pilgrims to Mecca, tennis-players coming to Wimbledon, migrant workers picking strawberries in Kent, and expats, the stereotype being tourists. Other groups may be more permanent, such as migrant workers, missionaries, prisoners, retirees and refugees. An overall term can be visitor language community. Visitors mostly have no real connection with the main society around them since they are not committed to permanent residence. Nor do they necessarily have any links to native speakers: 74% of tourism through English involves only L2 users (World Tourism Organisation, cited in Graddol, 2006). Their uses for the second language reflect the purposes of their visit, ranging from the minimal use of embassy staff to the maximal expertise that some British Colonial Officers had with local languages.

- the international professional community of L2 users – international function-driven language

We have already alluded to the L2 user community that consists of people using a second language for diverse reasons around the globe with other people who are mostly not native speakers, whether through actual physical contact or through e-mails and telephones. English has become a Lingua Franca among many professions, for instance  academics using English as the language for journals and conferences everywhere. Particular religions have expected believers to learn the language of their religious texts, whether Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, or, occasionally, English. We can call this an international function-driven language. Its speakers are members of communities that cross frontiers, whether professional or religious.

- the micro community – personal language

People have often joked that the best way of learning a language is to marry someone who speaks it. Ingrid Piller (2002) has documented the successful use of language by couples who speak different first languages. The community here is micro – two people. Parents can decide to have a micro-community in which they use a language to their children they will not encounter outside the home whether George Saunders (1988) using German in Australia or d’Armond Speers using Klingon (d’Armond Speers 2006). But pairs of people can also decide to use a second language: Henry James used to converse with Joseph Conrad in French. We can call this a personal language community.  

- the community of L2 educated students – educational language

Another community of L2 users is those seeking education through another language. On the one hand this may be another L2 island in an L1 sea; in the Netherlands universities use English alongside Dutch. In reverse students go to another country to get their higher education, Zaireans to Paris, or Greeks to England. In other words a second language is the vehicle for getting an education, more or less regardless of the native speakers (except in so far as they can profit by teaching ‘their’ language). We can call this the education language community.

- the community of students learning L2 in school – school language

Finally the most numerous group of second language learners are probably children based in countries where the language is not spoken being taught another language within the educational system, nowadays in many cases from the age of two upwards. This is the classic foreign language situation whether French in England or Spanish in Japan. The traditional aim has been to make the students members of one of the communities we have already described – future tourists or tourist workers, future international users etc. They do not form a community of use in the same sense as the others, perhaps the only group that can really be called learners rather than users since they have target communities to aim to belong to. But often the goal is simply to get through the hurdles set by the examination system: language is a school subject, taught and assessed like other subjects. We can call this the school language community.

Once we give up the illusion that the L2 user is trying to become part of the native speaker community, there are many sets of people that they can join, doubtless many more than mentioned here. The L2 users’ identities and goals are related to what they can achieve in these groups – by surviving successfully in a country where their language is in the minority, by conducting business profitably through another language, by maintaining a happy marriage, and all the other aims that human beings may have to which language is relevant. The distinctive feature of second language acquisition is that people may become part of many different types of L2 user community, unlike the comparatively simple monolingual native speaker community. SLA research has to consider how to accommodate this variation rather than assuming that L2 users are peripheral members of a monolingual community.

Conclusions

At one level this paper is a plea to SLA research to make clear what it is talking about. The nature of the first language in the individual and the community needs to be spelled out for any piece of SLA research; neither the first language nor the second are by any means a given, whether static, developing or reducing. It is vital for any SLA research to make clear how the term ‘language’ itself is being used. The L2‑using community that the L2 users belong to, or want to belong to, needs careful consideration, rather than a knee-jerk reaction that the monolingual native speaker community is all.

At another level this paper shows the difficulty in separating the two languages whether in the individual or the community. An individual or a community that know another language are not monolingual with an added language but something else. SLA research involves looking at both languages in the community or in the individual; their separation perpetuates a deficit model in which the L2 user lacks elements of language rather than possesses extra elements of language; seeing them as a whole tackles the true complexity of the mind that knows more than one language, getting away from separating languages and counting them to treating the L2 user as a whole within a community of their own.