“CHEAP PRICE, MISTER”: ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA IN ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN INFORMAL LOCAL TRADERS AND FOREIGN TOURISTS AT AMED, KARANGASEM, BALI

Abstract

Informal traders in emerging coastal destinations of the Global South must communicate with foreign tourists in English without the benefit of formal instruction, yet research on tourism English remains concentrated on hotel and travel professionals in established destinations rather than on this population. This study examines the English communication patterns that develop between informal local traders and foreign tourists at Amed, an emerging destination in Karangasem Regency, Bali, Indonesia, and identifies the factors that support and inhibit their cross-cultural communication. Adopting a descriptive qualitative design informed by an English as a lingua franca (ELF) perspective, the study combined naturalistic non-participant observation of trader–tourist service encounters with semi-structured interviews with eighteen purposively selected traders, and analysed the data using Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña's (2014) interactive model of data condensation, display, and conclusion drawing and verification, with credibility strengthened by methods triangulation, member checking, and peer debriefing. The findings show that traders enact a consistent two-stage pattern: interactions are initiated non-verbally through smiles, waves, eye contact, and handshakes, and then sustained through short, formulaic English expressions that prioritise transactional success over grammatical accuracy. Hospitality-oriented Balinese cultural dispositions and economic necessity emerged as the principal supporting factors, whereas limited vocabulary and grammar, difficulty comprehending diverse tourist accents, and limited knowledge of service-excellence conventions constituted the main barriers. The study extends ELF scholarship into the informal tourism economy, showing that traders achieve intelligibility by combining a narrow verbal repertoire with multimodal resources even under conditions of minimal proficiency, and it offers an empirical basis for community-based English for specific purposes training in emerging destinations.