Let’s be frank about franca: four factors in code-sharing in academic settings

ELF is on everyone’s lips, but not everyone who talks about it is actually talking about the same thing; and not everyone who is in the process of speaking ELF would actually be aware of doing so. One of the reasons for this is that we are accustomed to thinking about languages as things and that we think of these ‘language things’ as specific to geographical places. This, however, is not the only way of looking at and for languages. We can think of languages as symbolic. In this sense, languages are not territorial but social practices whose potential symbolic significance is context-specific. Using a lingua franca is less to do with where we are (from), but where we are with someone else, how we are contextualizing each other and what our communicative resources and purposes are. It is therefore what speakers bring to a meaning-making exchange - their mutual context(ualization), their purposes and the goals of the communication and what action or product the participants’ using of specific linguistic resources constitutes - that is decisive for determining whether or not, or to what degree, what we find, or what we are doing together, is English as a Lingua Franca. This contribution focuses on how a four-factor model explains the choice of code-sharing lingua franca mode in two multilingual academic settings at a Swiss university and how it can capture what is franca about ELF in terms of: how a speech event/oral genre anchors/instantiates English; how a Community of Practice (CoP) regulates degrees of involvement/criteria; how (self-)socialization/multilingualisation promotes code-sharing, oral embodiment, somatic habitus; and habitat, which is where we look for ELF and see how its creative potential as a symbolic resource fares in different contexts.