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INTRODUCTION
Quello dell’identità europea è un problema antico.
Ma il dialogo tra letterature, filosofie, opere musicali e teatrali esiste da tempo.
E su di esso si fonda una comunità che resiste alla più grande barriera:
quella linguistica.
Umberto Eco
The English Language Teaching industry in the United Kingdom has exponentially grown
over the recent years and became a huge market that generates wealth in the country and that
fluctuates as much as the financial one. A growing amount of people is willing to pay important
sums to obtain an adequate education and numerous private companies flourished which, driven
by the huge potential profits that this market provides, started to offer services for people of all
ages. Entrepreneurs have seen economical opportunities skyrocketing in an industry that,
compared to other sectors, seems to be less affected by the financial crisis. Authorities have in
fact estimated that every year around 550.000 international students come to the UK to learn
and/or improve their knowledge of the language for further studies or employments, staying for
an average period of 3.7 weeks. With this aim they attend universities, colleges and private
language centers in every region and nation of the United Kingdom, sometimes located in minor
areas where they represent a major driver of the local economy. The reports make an esteem of
the overall economic contribution of ELT students to the country that amounts to around £1.4
billion each year.
1
The remarkable aspect is that not all benefits are easily measurable: ELT students support
35.700 jobs in the UK - directly and indirectly - including not only jobs in language centers and
their supply chains, but also local shops, cafés, tourist attractions, transport and other places
1
International English students & their value to the UK, English UK report (2019)
https://www.englishuk.com/uploads/assets/public_affairs/2018_mac/English_UK_MAC_submission_executive_
summary.pdf
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where students and their visitors spend money. The ELT centers employ 19,300 staff in all roles
including teachers, welfare operators, marketing experts and managers. Furthermore, students
tend to maximize their experience and their expenditures go far beyond course fees and
accommodation: during their time in the UK, they spent an extra £880 million, with a further
£155 million a year coming from visiting friends and family. Even ordinary families benefit
culturally and financially from hosting students into their homes, often starting longlife
friendships. As if that is not enough, 80% of students plan to return after their courses ended,
perhaps bringing friends and family. Studying in the United Kingdom has indeed an impressive
impact on students, developing affection for the country and most of them go home with warm
feelings that will be shared with their companions, hopefully stimulating other connections with
the country in future.
Cultural exchanges have been unquestionably favored by the freedom of movement in the
European Union. The latter gives European citizens the right to live, work and study anywhere in
the euro zone and it represents one of the EU founding principles because it‟s the maximum
expression of cultural exchanges, inhibition of knowledge gaps and boost of the internal market.
This right (and many others) is under threat since the 23
rd
June 2016, when British citizens
expressed their preference about the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European
Union. The referendum – appealing to the modalities established by Article 50 of the Treaty on
European Union – triggered a process better known as “Brexit” that turned out to be more
delicate and complicated than expected. The overwhelming victory of the "leave" created quite a
disarray and ignited a process of postponements, uncertainties, resignations, economic
fluctuations, propaganda and heated debates that is still to this day unsolved.
This is incredibly relevant given the fact that more than half of the ELT students in Great
Britain come from the European Union: depriving them of these important benefits could make
them opt for another destination that is not affected by these disadvantages, such as Ireland or
Malta, and could put in danger the primacy of the industry of cultural exchanges in the United
Kingdom. On the other hand, the depreciation of the currency has led many students to shift their
choice from Ireland to the UK: the benefits will be in vigour until the end of the so-called
“transition period” and, in the meantime, students benefit of the weak pound to enrol in more
affordable courses.
Simultaneously, many European workers – which constitute a big proportion of employees in
all sectors in the UK – feel discouraged by all the bureaucratic issues triggered by the Brexit and
do not feel welcome in the country anymore, consequentially considering other places to
advance their careers. With Brexit, Europeans who work and study there will also have to face
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the concerns of recession, currency devaluation, bureaucratic chaos, and – last but not least – the
risk of becoming the enemy pointed at by right-wing parties to focus the predictable social anger
of post-Brexit.
The release of this dissertation represents an attempt to clarify how the Brexit process affects
and will affect the language learning and intercultural travel industry, both from the client,
institutional and managerial perspective. My interest in this topic stems from the experience I
had the good fortune to make by working as an Activity Leader for Education First on the Isle of
Wight, in the South of England. This experience not only enriched me from a professional and
personal point of view, but it also gave me the opportunity to approach the way of thinking of the
British community and to confront the various and contrasting realities that led to the Brexit
process.
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CHAPTER ONE
ENGLISH AND GLOBALIZATION
The most obvious characteristic of human communication is the use of language. Man is the
only creature to have this extraordinary communication tool, which must have marked a turning
point in its evolution. Thanks to this, in fact, we manage to keep individualized societies of
immensely larger proportions than the primates ones. Language not only facilitates tradition, but
allows us to build shared representations of the world and of social reality itself. Because of this
we managed to fulfill the development of analytical, reasoning and reflection skills. This is why
it is an essential instrument of culture, which has favored abstraction and has led us to draw
universal knowledge valid in other circumstances. According to the linguist D. Bickerton:
Only language could have broken through the prison of immediate experience in which every other
creature is locked, releasing us into infinite freedoms of space and time. Only language could have
refined the primitive categories of other creatures and built them into complex systems that could
describe and even seem to explain the world.
2
When compared, the different human languages prove to be equal in terms of complexity of
the grammatical structure and richness of the lexicon. If we take our own dictionary, for
instance, and compare it with the vocabulary used by a man of a simple society, we will certainly
discover that there are many more words in the dictionary. The comparison, however, is wrong,
because the dictionary is not an individual lexical heritage, but collects the vocabulary
accumulated by a civilization in its history, which tends to grow in complex and technologized
societies due to specialized terms. This means that all languages have the same expressive
potential: an individual of hunter-gatherer groups transplanted into our era would have no
vocabulary to name certain things such as „computer‟ or „SMS‟, but he would have no trouble
saying what he meant to say. Languages are cultural adaptations: they constantly change in
relation to cultural changes. The consequence is that "every language is suitable for the culture
that speaks it: in that context, for that kind of life, it is the best possible"
3
.
If it is true that languages adapt, somehow, to the population that uses them, what happens in
a globalized and interconnected reality like ours? Over the last few years communication
2
D. Bickerton, Language and species, University of Chicago Press (1992), p. 256.
3
P. Di Giovanni, Psicologia della comunicazione, Zanichelli (2007), p. 164.
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between individuals of different languages and countries has increased exponentially in all
contexts. In this situation characterized by multiculturalism and multilingualism, the use of a
third language, different than the ones of origin of the speakers, is more and more chosen to
simplify and accelerate the communicative process.
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1.1 The New Lingua Franca
Already in the twentieth century the British flag was planted on all continents, in India,
Australia, South Africa and Canada. English was imported into the former colonies as the
language of administration, commerce and education, going alongside - if not supplanting - local
languages. Despite the crumbling of the British Empire which followed the declaration of
independence of Gandhi's India in 1947, the preponderance of the English language in the world
did not decrease. In fact at the end of WWII, while Great Britain‟s power was declining, the
United States emerged worldwide as a superpower.
An essential element of the post-war period was the Marshall Plan: thanks to it credits and
supplies of various kinds of goods arrived in Europe with the effect, on one hand, of revitalizing
the economic system prostrated by the consequences of the war and, on the other, of allowing the
US to set its roots in the Old Continent‟s economic system. Moreover, with the Bretton Woods
agreements of 1944, the dollar became the reference currency for international trade, since the
US central bank, the Federal Reserve, ensured its convertibility into gold. Since then, the central
banks of other countries could store dollars in their reserves instead of gold and in the following
decades the American currency began to circulate throughout the international financial system.
An important boost to economic recovery also came from the network of agreements that
founded a first draft of the European community. The trial began on April the eighteenth, 1951
when, on the initiative of Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, the representatives of six European
countries agreed to coordinate the production and exchange of coal and steel, founding the
European Coal and Steel Community. Later on, the same countries signed the Treaty of Rome,
founding the European Economic Community (EEC) with the aim of forming a common
European market. On this basis, a collective body was set up with the task of coordinating
energy resources, the European Atomic Energy Community.
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Not surprisingly, in the aftermath
4
Thomas Christiansen, L’inglese lingua franca come strumento di marketing nel commercio internazionale,
Università del Salento (2017).
5
Alberto Mario Banti, L’età contemporanea - Dalla Grande Guerra a oggi, Editori Laterza (2012), p. 398.
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of the war, the idiom of the two winning countries established itself as the official language of
the international organizations mentioned before and became the most widely used language in
international trade.
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The whole process of globalization has been driven by neoliberal economic principles,
massively tested in the UK by Margaret Thatcher and in the US by Ronald Reagan. Privatization,
reduction of state deficits, freedom of trade and investment, abolition of protectionist barriers are
the essential points of a policy created on the initiative of US and British political authorities and
then projected in Europe. The deregulation policy has favored the transport revolution, which has
enabled the upper classes to experience the thrill of travelling by plane, thanks to the multiplying
of airline companies and to the falling of prices. The feeling is that the world has become a
"global village", where anyone can think that a famous American actress like Marilyn Monroe is
as familiar to her as her neighbor is; and people hope to be able to travel to places never seen
before.
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On top of that, the authority of North America as a superpower was definitively
confirmed in 1989 with the breakdown of the USSR, when the United States seemed to be the
only one able to govern - even with the use of force - international relations, in terms of for
military strength, political authority and economical solidity.
The global spread of English has been a cultural fact, as well as political and economic. For
decades American TV series broadcasted the American way of life in the Western world and
massively inserted English into advertising. The relaunch of consumption was in fact
enormously stimulated the former, that became a daily feature in everyone's life: it pushed
people towards purchases which seemed to promise a new quality of life.
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The same is true for
the cinema, where the process of Americanization is even clearer: movies coming from the
United States attracted many spectators, whether they were film noir, westerns, or brilliant
comedies. Despite the resistance opposed by the flourishing European film companies, it was
clear right from the very beginning that the real great successes came from Hollywood. This is
why many talented European authors – like Alfred Hitchcock – flew to the USA to search for a
global audience.
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6
The European Union and International Organizations, K. E. Jørgensen, Routledge (2009).
7
History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan, R.
Soffer, Oxford University Press (2009).
8
Perché l’inglese è la lingua franca globale?, D. Canepa, Era Superba (2012).
http://genova.erasuperba.it/perche-inglese-lingua-franca-internazionale
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English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and teaching English, I. Mackenzie, Routledge (2014)
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