ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the cognitive and communicative processes involved in the production and reception of discourse in ELF that occur within domain-specific contexts where non-native speakers of English – i.e., EU experts in authority (in the case studies under analysis, intercultural mediators in legal and medical contexts) and non-EU immigrants as supplicants (in the cases in point, from Sub-Saharian West-Africa) – interact in centres for legal advice and medical assistance to migrants and asylum seekers. In such contexts, the experts’ interviews often turn into gate-keeping situations because of misunderstandings frequently caused by different ELF variations in contact. It has been observed (Guido 2008, 2012) that, although both groups make use of English as their means of communication, the English variations each uses in these migration contexts are often respectively – to use Kachru’s (1986) terminology – from the outer circle (regarding the variations spoken by immigrants mainly coming from former British colonies) and from the expanding circle (variations spoken by EU experts who are non-native speakers of English). Precisely as the native-speaker varieties from the inner circle are norm providing, so also the outer-circle ones are recognized as being endonormative, having developed different norms characterizing their own ‘different’ Englishes, which are accepted as legitimate variations since they have become ‘official’ in former colonial contexts. And yet, such an acceptance does not apply to the expanding-circle English variations, which are instead conventionally regarded as exonormative in reference to the inner-circle norms and, thus, as ‘defective variants’ of the native-speaker language. What has been observed to happen (Guido 2008) in migration domains is that when outer-circle varieties are dislocated in an EU context and come into contact with exonormative expanding-circle variations, they lose their endonormative status as they come to be perceived by EU experts in charge of interactions on exactly the same level as other expanding-circle ELF variations – that is, as mere ‘deficient’ variants of the inner-circle standard norms.
