What is English as a Lingua Franca?

‘English’, as a language, has for some time been seen as a global phenomenon and, therefore, as no longer defined by fixed territorial, cultural and social functions. At the same time, people using English around the world have been shaping it and adapting it to their contexts of use and have made it relevant to their socio-cultural settings. English as a Lingua Franca, or ELF for short, is a field of research interest that was born out of this tension between the global and the local, and it originally began as a ramification of the World Englishes framework in order to address the international, or, rather, transnational perspective on English in the world. The field of ELF very quickly took on a nature of its own in its attempt to address the communication, attitudes, ideologies in transnational contexts, which go beyond the national categorisations of World Englishes (such as descriptions of Nigerian English, Malaysian English and other national varieties). ELF research, therefore, has built on World Englishes research by focusing on the diversity of English, albeit from more transnational, intercultural and multilingual perspectives.

ELF is an intercultural medium of communication used among people from different socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and usually among people from different first languages. Although it is possible that many people who use ELF have learnt it formally as a foreign language, at school or in an educational institution, the emphasis is on using rather than on learning. And this is a fundamental difference between ELF and English as a Foreign Language, or EFL, whereby people learn English to assimilate to or emulate native speakers. In ELF, instead, speakers are considered language users in their own right, and not failed native speakers or deficient learners of English. Some examples of typical ELF contexts may include communication among a group of neuroscientists, from, say, Belgium, Brazil and Russia, at an international conference on neuroscience, discussing their work in English, or an international call concerning a business project between Chinese and German business experts, or a group of migrants from Syria, Ethiopia and Iraq discussing their migration documents and requirements in English. The use of English will of course depend on the linguistic profile of the participants in these contexts, and they may have another common language at their disposal (other than English), but today ELF is the most common medium of intercultural communication, especially in transnational contexts.

So, research in ELF pertains to roughly the same area of research as English as a contact language and English sociolinguistics. However, the initial impetus to conducting research in ELF originated from a pedagogical rationale – it seemed irrelevant and unrealistic to expect learners of English around the world to conform to native norms, British or American, or even to new English national varieties, which would be only suitable to certain socio-cultural and geographical locations. So, people from Brazil, France, Russia, Mozambique, or others around the world, would not need to acquire the norms originated and relevant to British or American English speakers, but could orientate themselves towards more appropriate and relevant ways of using English, or ELF. Researchers called for “closing a conceptual gap” between descriptions of native English varieties and new empirical and analytical approaches to English in the world. With the compilation of a number of corpora, ELF empirical research started to explore how English is developing, emerging and changing in its international uses around the world. Since the empirical corpus work started, research has expanded beyond the pedagogical aim, to include explorations of communication in different domains of expertise (professional, academic, etc.) and in relation to other concepts and research, such as culture, ideology and identity.

Adapted from https://www.gold.ac.uk/glits-e/ back-issues/english-as-a-lingua-franca/