Editorial [in Language and Intercultural Communication]

The central debate within this journal, and the Association to which it is allied (IALIC), can quite possibly be boiled down to two fundamental questions. First, what does it mean to speak a language? And secondly, how does learning another language relate to the idea of learning another ‘culture’? In the discussions that have taken place around these questions over the past twenty years, one word which frequently crops up is the word ‘competence’. Speaking another language is conventionally referred to as ‘language competence’; communicating with someone from another ‘culture’ is conventionally referred to as ‘intercultural (communicative) competence’. The four papers in this open issue all address some aspects of these two questions, but in so doing, they also raise another couple of related questions. First, what is a ‘language’? That is to say, is a language a self-contained system, which operates monologically at its different levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics? Or should we conceive of a language as something that is constituted dialogically as a synthesis of the different linguistic systems which the different interlocutors (‘real’, or imagined as in literature) have at their disposal? Secondly, are the two ‘capabilities’, which I have set out above, part of a single interlinked system of competence (as perhaps posited in early sociolinguistic conceptualisations of communicative competence, such as Canale & Swain, 1980);or to what extent are they separate capabilities