By the end of the twentieth century English was already well on its way to becoming a genuine lingua franca. Just as in the Middle Ages Latin became for a time a language of international communication, so English is now commonly used in exchanges between, say, Japanese and Argentinian business people or between Singaporeans and their Vietnamese counterparts.

A number of researchers have studied lingua franca conversations and have noted a number of somewhat surprising characteristics, including:

• Increasing of redundancy by adding prepositions (We have to study about... and Can we discuss about...?).

• Large use of certain verbs of high semantic generality, such as do, have, make, put, take.

• Pluralisation of nouns which are considered uncountable in native-speaker English (advices, staffs).

The evidence suggests that non-native speakers are not conforming to a native English standard. Indeed they seem to get along perfectly well despite the fact that they miss things out and put things in which they ‘should not do’. Not only this, but they are actually better at ‘accommodating’ than native speakers are when talking to second language speakers.

(Jeremy Harmer. The practice of English language teaching. Adaptado)

The expression lingua franca refers to