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English	as	a	global	lingua	franca:	Changing
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Mauranen, A. 2015. English as a global Lingua Franca: changing language in changing global 
academia. In Murata, K. (ed.) Exploring ELF in Japanese Academic and 
Business Contexts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 29-46. 
 
 
English as a global lingua franca - changing language in changing global 
academia. 
 
 
Anna Mauranen 
University of Helsinki 
 
 
In early January 2012, a few international newspapers devoted headlines to a change 
in the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, no longer compelling botanists 
to provide a Latin description of a new species. New plants could now be described in 
English, although Latin species names are still used. This small alteration in the 
practices of a discipline that for centuries had adhered to Latin as its international 
language is an apt indication of the status of English in science today. As Washington 
Post put it: “For world's botanists, Latin is no longer their lingua franca”. 
 We can find evidence of the special status English has acquired among the 
world’s languages in many other ways. It is by any account the most widespread 
language on the globe ever. Its journey around the world began in earnest in the 16th 
century, during the reign of Elizabeth I, but it had already secured a foothold as far as 
Africa in the 14th century. The expansion that followed is well charted by many 
researchers, and there is no doubt that the economic and political power exercised by 
the British Empire and subsequently the United States have been the principal agents 
in establishing this. However, we have reached a stage where other political powers 
and rising economies are gaining ground over the English-speaking nations. Still, the 
English language shows no signs of getting smaller. The number of speakers is 
growing, as are the domains and regions where it is used. Today it spreads under its 
own steam: everyone speaks English because everyone else does. An important 
moment about twenty years ago was the onset of the Internet: it connected the world 
in a single network of communication, principally based on English. The result was 
explosive globalization and expansion in the use of English. All this makes English 
unique among languages. 
 This unprecedented expansion of English presents intriguing questions for 
linguists: what happens to a language when it spreads around the globe and gets into 
contact with virtually all other languages in the world? We know for instance that in 
times of high population mobility, languages tend to change at an accelerated speed; 
what is happening to English in our extremely mobile world? 
 We can look at the questions from different perspectives. One is the 
theoretical linguistic interest: what are the consequences to a language when it gets 
into an unusually complex language contact situation? The second type of interest, 
essentially a descriptive one, concerns the language itself: how does English in 
particular change – how might its immensely widespread use as the default lingua 
franca in many walks of life influence the language as a whole? And finally, there is 
the applied interest: what do these changes mean to the language professional? How 
should language professionals respond, as educators, evaluators, and translators, for 
example, and finally, what does this mean for those who educate language 
professionals? 
This paper seeks to address these questions, albeit briefly. The primary focus 
is on descriptive issues of English as a lingua franca, as the basis that feeds into 
theoretical thinking on language. At the same time, descriptive findings can help 
illuminate the path forward to pedagogical thinking and devising new solutions for 
language professions, if we are to move onwards from merely raising awareness. 
 
1. Common concerns about English as a lingua franca 
 
The rise of English into a dominant global position has not been received with 
equanimity everywhere. As awareness of the ubiquity of English has grown, debate 
around the desirability of this state of affairs has increased. While some writers object 
to the increasing use of English in any form (e.g. Phillipson 1992; Harder 2009; 
Jansson 2008), many others deplore its declining standards as it is used by non-native 
speakers as a lingua franca (e.g. Quirk 1985). 
 
1.1 Will English wipe out other languages? 
 
The first concern is, then, that the expansion of English will lead to a monolingual, 
homogenous world. Moreover, the argument goes, as language and culture are 
inextricably intertwined, the consequent spread of a homogeneous world culture, 
modelled on North America, will follow. This dystopia has been markedly present in 
Phillipson’s work, and groups in countries where English has become common in 
higher education have voiced growing concerns about this. In Europe, for instance in 
Nordic countries, many scholars have claimed that English threatens the existence of 
small national languages, or at the very least reduces their repertoire of genres (see, 
e.g. Carli and Ammon 2007; Haberland 2005). Anxiety about the disadvantages non-
native speakers of English may experience in academic publishing (Ammon 2007; 
Canagarajah 2002; Flowerdew 2008; Lillis and Curry 2010) has also been raised. It is 
of course undeniable that English as an academic language plays a central role in all 
domains where international concerns are at stake: publication, conferences, research 
projects, and most recently degree programmes in countries where English has no 
official status. As Gentil and Séror (2014) put it, “the quasi-hegemony of English in 
scientific publications is now a fait accompli”. 
However, debates aside, some studies have presented evidence indicating that 
local language use has not been reduced as a consequence of English-medium 
instruction in higher education (Madsen 2008). Neither has a decline been attested in 
local language academic publications despite the growing number of publications in 
English (Bolton and Kuteeva 2012; McGrath 2014). Interestingly, the strongest fears 
about the detrimental effects of English-medium study programmes on learning have 
begun to abate over the last few years (Wächter 2008), possibly with growing 
familiarity and experience. 
 As far as the global spread of English is concerned, a complex picture emerges. 
The best-known comprehensive model for describing English according to its status 
and function in different contexts was drawn up by Kachru (1985). He analyses the 
position of English in terms of three concentric circles. Very roughly, Kachru placed 
the ‘core varieties’ of English from a handful of countries (such as the USA, the UK, 
and Canada) as the “Inner Circle”. Around this centre, in an “Outer Circle”, he set a 
larger group of varieties, mostly in former British colonies, where English has an 
official status and indigenized varieties to a certain extent. Examples of countries in 
this zone include India, Singapore, Nigeria, and Kenya. The final, “Expanding Circle”, 
consists of countries where English is essentially a foreign language, such as for 
instance Japan, Korea, and most European countries. Kachru’s model has come under 
much criticism, which has lead him to modify the model for example in 1992, but the 
original concepts and labels remain in place and are widely known andquoted 
conceptualisations of the main grouping of Englishes today. From the present 
perspective, the principal shortcoming in this model is that it does not account for the 
use of English across boundaries of countries and regions, as a lingua franca between 
countries and regions. Disputes about where to classify which country are 
unimportant if we take into account the most notable use of English as a vehicle of 
communication across boundaries, in global networks. The model is also out-dated by 
today’s standards, since it has not taken on board the enormous changes instigated by 
the Internet. 
 English is not the first extensive lingua franca. Lingua francas, contact 
languages used by speakers who do not share a first language, have been used for as 
long as we can trace back the history of languages. Some of the previously 
widespread lingua francas (see, for example Weber 1995) are now extinct, like 
Sanskrit, Sumerian, or Latin, others have become small, such as Greek or Aramaic, 
but some live on as influential lingua francas, like Arabic. If the past is anything to go 
by, English is not likely to be the last significant lingua franca on Earth. 
 From a different historical perspective, homogeneity among human languages 
is not a very plausible outcome. As evolutionary scientists Pagel and Mace (2004) 
have observed, the distribution patterns of human languages and of species show very 
close resemblances, with the densities of both peaking towards the Equator. The 
number of languages is thus highest where human populations are densest; we can 
take this as evidence of languages marking group boundaries and maintaining group 
identities. Languages therefore do not only unite, they also separate. Findings like 
these do not predict homogenisation for human languages. Moreover, for endangered 
languages the enemy is usually the neighbouring large language, typically the national 
language of the country where the endangered languages are in a minority position. 
Lingua francas are employed for communicating across linguistic diversity, not for 
replacing it. 
 
1.2 Does ELF lead to degenerate English? 
 
Many people, largely laymen, have expressed their apprehension about English being 
on its way to an impoverished, simplified language. For example Jeff Yang in his in 
Wall Street Journal blog “Is Proper English Dying? And Should Us Care?” from late 
2011 deplores the standards of English declining in the hands of hundreds of millions 
of people learning it as a foreign language. This is what he says: 
 “…Learning English isn’t the same as knowing English, and knowing English 
isn’t the same as being able to speak good, or even intelligible English.” 
In this view, ‘good’ is higher up the scale than ‘intelligibility’, and no questions are 
raised about who might be the evaluator of this goodness – or this intelligibility. 
Later on it becomes clear that he only has his immediate environment in North 
America in mind, and the issue of intelligibility to the rest of the world has not 
crossed his mind: 
“The problem is that while deficits in grammar, vocabulary and diction can be 
addressed with study and rote repetition, one language flaw is nearly 
impossible to fix with traditional training methods alone: Accent. 
Even the most fluent classroom-taught student is instantly recognizable as a 
“non-native speaker.” 
This time ‘good’ equals “native-like” in the U.S. Yet for people speaking English 
around the world the first priority may not be sounding as much like a native speaker 
of American English as possible, but communicating fluently with colleagues, friends, 
or business partners. Whatever ‘good language’ ultimately consists in is a complex, 
often debatable, and always tightly context-bound phenomenon. 
The complexity of assessing good language is illustrated by a questionnaire 
study I ran a few years ago (Mauranen 2007). The participants were undergraduates 
from a variety of disciplines, including science and social science students and among 
others English Translation studies. Among the questions I asked was whether they 
preferred to read translations or foreign-language originals. Originals were preferred 
by a wide margin in all groups. The reasons given were essentially related to the 
notion of originality, which clearly was valued for its own sake; it was ‘authentic’, 
‘original’, ‘the real thing’, unlike translations, where the translator acted as a mediator. 
However, translations had their merits, too: their value was seen in being more 
intelligible than original texts in a foreign language. The downside of originals, in 
turn, was their unintelligibility and the risk of non-understanding or misunderstanding 
in reading them. The point of this in the present context is that the ‘goodness’ of a text 
was not deemed as a higher level of ‘intelligibility’, but a different matter altogether; 
they were simply conceived of and evaluated on separate scales. This resonates with 
what Contrastive Rhetoric research has observed consistently: assessment of good text 
is highly variable according to cultural contexts. Different writing traditions give rise 
to different kinds of rhetoric and different textual preferences. As we undergo 
secondary socialization in local systems of education, we also get socialized into 
certain ways of seeing language and text. Thus, good text – and good language – are 
acquired tastes, and no objective, context-independent standards can be appealed to. 
Beauty, once again, is in the eye of the beholder. 
 With English in mind, we have been socialised into seeing certain texts as 
valuable and as ideals to measure other texts against. This is part of established 
educational traditions in English, whether carried out in ‘Inner Circle’ school systems 
or ‘Outer’ or ‘Expanding’ circle educational institutions. But even these traditions 
cannot last in the face of change. Stopping for a moment to appreciate the effects of 
foreign influences, we might briefly glance at some quintessentially English texts and 
how they appear through history. 
 The first example (1) is Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon heroic poem from 
somewhere between the 8th and the 11th centuries, considered one of the most 
important works of Old English literature. 
(1) Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, 
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, 
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. 
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, 
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, 
egsode eorlas. 
However well we speak contemporary English, it will not enable us to make sense of 
this without specialised study. Although Scandinavian had clearly intermingled with 
the language here, present-day Scandinavian languages will not be of much help in 
deciphering this text. When only a few centuries had elapsed after Beowulf, the 
French had become a strong influence on English, and the language had become 
considerably friendlier to modern eyes (Example 2 is from the Canterbury Tales). 
 
(2) 1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote 
2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, 
3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour 
4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 
 
This is already something we can read or make good guesses about on the basis of 
English today, and the simplification we can observe is undoubtedly occasioned by 
language contact, both from the Vikings and from the French. The final extract is 
from the heyday of English imperial power, two hundred years ago, when English had 
come into contact with a great variety of languages for a few more centuries. 
Language contact is a crucial factor in language change, and it is reasonable to 
assume it had further influenced English during the Empire. This masterpiece from 
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) presents no difficulty to the modern reader (3). 
 
(3) “How despicablyI have acted!" she cried; "I, who have prided myself on my 
discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often 
disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless 
or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery!” 
 
In the light of these extracts, it is hard to put the blame on foreign influence for 
declining linguistic standards, if indeed there has been any. Clearly, English has done 
very well despite its contact with other languages. Yet we have not even touched upon 
celebrated authors in the canon of English literature who were not native speakers. 
 
2. English as a lingua franca 
 
A lingua franca is a specific kind of language contact: lingua francas are vehicular 
languages, or contact languages, used when speakers do not share a first language. 
Similar definitions to this have been previously presented in Jenkins (2000) and 
Seidlhofer (2011), but some ELF scholars, like Firth (1996) or House (2002) have 
preferred definitions which exclude native speakers altogether. The present definition 
allows them to be included, which is an advantage in accounting for multi-party 
encounters with a mixture of native and second-language speakers. While lingua 
francas are kinds of contact languages, at the same time they are also sites of language 
contact, because speakers’ first and other languages are present as an influence, and 
often also drawn on as situational needs arise. 
When contemporary English is used as a lingua franca, it displays certain 
characteristics that derive from its current status as the default global contact 
language: speakers come from immensely varied language backgrounds. The different 
language backgrounds each tend to have their own, L1-influenced ways of speaking. 
These L1-based varieties, or lects, are sometimes nicknamed Spanglish, Swinglish, or 
Dunglish, for example, reflecting their similarities in origin and identifiable features. I 
call these varieties, or lects, ‘similects’ for lack of a better term (Mauranen 2012). 
Although cross-linguistic influence results similarities that are somewhat like dialect 
features, there is an important difference from dialects: similects are not used in 
speech communities for internal communication. A learned foreign language is not 
used as a community language among members of local speech communities for 
talking to each other. Therefore, these lects exist in parallel, as hybrids, and do not 
develop in their community contexts as dialects do. Neither do they evolve or diverge 
into sociolects. 
 Similects, however, resemble dialects in one respect relevant to lingua francas: 
they constitute mutually comprehensible varieties. Swinglish and Spanglish speakers 
understand each other, and they use their English lects for mutual communication. 
English as a lingua franca is in effect a contact between these similects, and in this 
sense we can regard it as a second-order language contact. From this perspective, it is 
easy to see how ELF is a site of particularly complex language contact. 
 
3. What is ELF like? 
 
In this section, I shall illustrate some prominent features of ELF. The data that I draw 
on comes from the corpus English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA), 
compiled as part of the ELFA project at the University of Helsinki 
(www.helsinki.fi/elfa). The whole project itself comprises three parts, the other two 
being Studying in English as a Lingua franca (SELF) and most recently a written 
corpus (WrELFA), which is the first database of written ELF. ELFA also sports a 
blog by one of its researchers, Ray Carey (http://elfaproject.wordpress.com/). The 
ELFA corpus comprises a million words of academic speech events, recorded in four 
universities in Finland and in international conferences. The recordings are 
deliberately biased in favour of dialogic events, as it was felt that the negotiation of a 
lingua franca in interaction was the most interesting site of lingua franca features. As 
a result, two thirds of the corpus consists of multi-party discussions between speakers 
from altogether 51 typologically diverse languages. 
 
3.1 Features and processes 
 
Language contact research has traditionally highlighted processes of simplification 
(e.g. Thomason 2001; Trudgill 1986, 2011), which is usually observed and debated in 
respect of structures and structural systems. Grammatical changes tend to be slow to 
take effect, with parallel forms lingering on sometimes for centuries. Present ELF-
induced changes in English structures are only manifest as incipient tendencies at best. 
However, there is clear evidence that at least lexical simplification is taking place 
(Mauranen 2012). This is observable in a tendency towards concentration in 
vocabulary so that the most frequent words are proportionally even more common in 
ELF. This tendency parallels a similar observation from translation studies, which 
suggests that it may be a more general contact-induced phenomenon. 
 It is far too early for trying to demonstrate systematic structural alterations in 
English despite its massive use as a lingua franca. However, certain trends can be 
observed in support of on-going structural changes. Some of the principal processes 
involve simplification as regularisation of irregular forms. One is the tendency of 
irregular verb forms to be replaced by regular forms, such as teached for taught, losed 
for lost, or stucked for stuck. In an analogous fashion, uncountable nouns tend to 
acquire plural endings and thereby become regular plurals of countable nouns 
(offsprings, furnitures, cooperations). 
 Articles and prepositions show non-standard uses quite frequently. Articles 
may be dropped (in Polish language), used superfluously (of the Wilson’s disease), 
or used differently from the standard (kind of a same process). Similarly, prepositions 
can be superfluous (discuss about) or missing (we’re dealing what is science), or they 
can deviate from standard use (obsession in). While there is not much detailed 
research into article use (but see Dewey 2006), some prepositional tendencies can be 
discerned: a certain trend towards simplification can be discerned so that in moves 
into the meaning domains of at (Mauranen 2012), and discuss about has become so 
common as to be attested in native English (ENL) speakers as well. 
 A readily observable process is also the high productivity in morphology, 
which is not held back by convention as it is in more stable and established language 
communities. Forms like the following abound in ELF use: insuitable; unuseful; 
territorical; maximalise; introducted; addictation. Some can be traced back to 
substitutions of semantic equivalents like negative prefixes, to well-attested processes 
of change like back-formation (introducted), others again confuse what often seem 
arbitrary conventions like -ic and -ical endings, which do not really distinguish 
meanings. Some solutions show ad hoc creativity inspectionals, devaluarised, 
undevelopment countries, which helps solve immediate communication problems, 
often successfully. 
 The most interesting process is perhaps approximation, the overall propensity 
to produce expressions that are close to the target, but not quite accurate. Examples in 
(4) illustrate this (with the assumed target forms in brackets). 
 
(4) 
…to er throw some lights in female deputies (‘throw light on’) 
… can't talk about content without talking of a process and the same way 
around (‘the other way around’) 
…in fact behind the lines you could very well read that (‘between the lines / 
behind the scenes’) 
…it has also sense (‘it also makes sense’) 
 
These approximations are easily intelligible in their contexts, because they serve 
recognisable functions with a sufficiently similarity in form. We can also discern 
some elementsmaintained of the expression speakers presumably have in mind: the 
overall shape and length together with key lexical elements. The elements that change 
but do not seriously obscure the meaning seem dispensable. Therefore we can 
hypothesise that it is less salient, more redundant elements that loosen up in 
successful lingua franca communication. 
 In brief, then, what these processes show is that in addition to the overarching 
tendency to approximate forms, both simplification and complexification are 
simultaneously going on. Simplification processes are observed in increasing 
regularity and in lexical concentration, and complexification can be seen in the 
increased variability and multiplicity of forms. 
 The puzzling question that remains is that some of the most common non-
standard features are prepositions and articles, which are among the most frequent 
items of English. We know that frequent language items generally 
behave differently from less frequent items. They tend to be more resistant to change, 
retain irregularity, and carry little independent meaning. The question therefore arises 
as to how a language tolerates such fuzziness in its most frequent elements. How do 
we manage to communicate so successfully in ELF despite an apparent disregard for 
high-frequency items? To look for an answer, it may be worthwhile to raise our gaze 
above the clause and look at discourse. 
 
3.2 What do speakers do to ascertain mutual intelligibility in ELF? 
 
 Common sense seems to assume that if people do not speak their first languages, they 
are prone to all kinds of miscommunication. In reality, ELF findings show that this is 
not the case. Misunderstandings are actually quite rare (House 2002; Kaur 2009; 
Mauranen 2006, Pietikäinen 2014). The publications so far have not provided 
quantified evidence, but I sampled six hours of recordings from the ELFA dialogues 
and found only two. More recently, Pietikäinen (2014) found 46 misunderstandings in 
over 24 hours of recorded dialogue among ELF couples. These figures support the 
qualitative findings. 
 How do speakers manage this? What special things do they do to bring this 
off? Let us first look at some examples illustrating micro-level processes, and then 
move on to text and interaction. 
 
3.2.1 Processing at micro level 
First of all, it is useful to bear in mind that speakers need not do anything 
extraordinary to achieve communication in ELF. It is known from psycholinguistic 
studies that although ordinary speech contains much that might be regarded as 
ungrammatical on closer inspection in written text, ‘ill-formed sentences’ and 
morphosyntactic anomalies present little difficulty to hearers’ processing (Dabrowska 
2004). 
 Secondly, a very large proportion of all text, whether spoken or written, is 
covered by the most frequent items in a language. Therefore, if these are used as 
building blocks to a sufficient degree, we may expect communication to have fairly 
good chances of success. To see how this works out in ELF, I compared the most 
frequent trigrams, or three-word sequences, in ELFA and a comparable ENL corpus, 
The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). As a result, it was 
found that the ten most frequent three-word units are virtually identical in an ELF 
corpus and an ENL corpus (MICASE) of academic speaking (5). We can see the same 
phenomenon continuing if we go down the rank order list, with bifurcation slowly 
increasing as we move down, as is normal in corpus data (Mauranen 2012). 
 
(5) 
ELF (ELFA) ENL (MICASE) 
1. I don’t know I don’t know 
2. a lot of a lot of 
3. I think that one of the 
4. one of the a little bit 
5. and so on you have to 
6. you have to this is the 
7. there is a this is a 
8. I think it’s in terms of 
9. the the the I don’t think 
10. a little bit some of the 
 
These trigrams are in essence conventionalised phraseological units, or in slightly 
different phrasing, multi-word units of meaning. They are important building blocks 
of discourse. They cut across the traditional division of vocabulary and grammar as 
they combine elements from lexis and structure in creating meaning. They are also 
frequent, and as for instance Wray (2002) has shown, contribute to fluency and 
predictability in ways that facilitate processing for both speakers and hearers. 
 A third strategy that speakers engage in is approximation, already touched 
upon above. Approximations that are sufficiently close to their target may not pose 
too much difficulty for a hearer to construct the meaning from the elements that are 
there. This proximity can show in form, as in (6), or in meaning, as in (7), in other 
words, the approximation can rest on either semantic or formal grounds. 
 
(6) 
… the potentional clients may not have (‘potential’) 
…the new generation of youngers have been a force for changes (‘youth’) 
…and the town prouded them pri- prouded itself of prided itself of being an 
artists' town (‘prided itself on’) 
 
 (7) 
…the main impediment in front of the gender movement (‘impediment to’) 
…germany as one of the biggest members of course of the EU as the entrance 
gate for russian energy flows (‘gateway’) 
…electoral rights are not natural born rights of individuals (‘birthright’) 
…the war has finished now (‘ended’) 
 
Multi-word units play an important role in rescuing the comprehensibility of 
approximations. If the more dispensable elements do not quite fall into line with 
prescriptive rules of Standard English, they may still survive without difficulty 
embedded in multi-word units. 
Approximative items stand a good chance of being understood if they give a 
sufficient hint of what the target item might be. Take (8) as an example: 
 
(8) 
to put the end on it 
 
This expression did not stir up any communicative turbulence in its original context, 
and it is easy to see why. The unit is of equal length to an equivalent standard 
expression (‘to put an end to it’), the key vocabulary items (put and end) are the same 
and in the same order, and it appears in a suitable function. These factors combine to 
form an identifiable schematic whole, which enables an interlocutor to assign a 
meaning to it. Thus the minor elements can vary within the whole without disrupting 
communication. This process is very similar to that described in for example Wray 
(2002), even though she confines her discussion to well-formed formulaic expressions 
that ENL speakers prefer. The point here is that the match does not have to be perfect 
in order to work with the same effectiveness. This also contributes to understanding 
why such frequent items as articles and prepositions can become dispensable: they 
very often appear as part of multi-word units, and therefore come under the protection 
of the schematic whole. Therefore, they can vary more than one might expect on the 
grounds of their frequency and their nature as function words alone. 
 
3.2.2 Discourse and interaction 
Moving on beyond clause-internal phenomena, the first step upwards is the syntax of 
the sentence. The characteristic syntactic strategy in ELF speech is enhanced 
explicitness, which is manifest in the prominent use of certain structures, particularly 
those hearer-friendly strategies that throw the discourse topic in sharp relief, such as 
‘headers’ or ‘left dislocation’ (9), and its mirror image, ‘tails’ or ‘right dislocation’ 
(10). 
 
 (9) 
…wealthy people they are opposed to this monopoly insurance system 
...Pippi Longstocking she ’s extremely strong 
 
(10) 
... and they are in very tight control those alcoholics 
…he says this is our greatest problem the the regional tensions 
 
Both syntactic devices involve the moving of the lexical topic referent outside the 
clause for prominence, and replacingit within the clause structure by a pro-form. 
Together, these structural means could be referred to as ‘negotiating referent’ (Ford et 
al. 2003) or ‘topic negotiation’ (Mauranen 2012). 
Rephrasing and reformulation (11) are also effective means of boosting 
clarity and explicitness, and so is metadiscourse (12). 
 
 (11) 
 ... because of the poor nutrition level this poor diet the whole standard of 
living was poor... 
 (12) 
well i have another point or or observation rather that i think could be 
mentioned… 
 
Beyond the sentence is the broader context of text or interaction. The unfolding 
discourse provides clues for sense-making for conversationalists; we make hypotheses 
of what is to follow in discourse on the basis of what has been said up to that point. 
Such predictions need to be checked in the light of what actually does get said, but 
relatively little will suffice for confirming or disconfirming our guesses. In this way, 
processing languages that are less well entrenched in the speaker’s mind resembles 
listening in less than perfect conditions. 
Speakers cooperate to achieve mutual intelligibility and to co-construct coherent 
discourse, and many scholars have noted the pronounced propensity of ELF speakers 
to engage in cooperative behaviour. In (13) we see collaborative completion as an 
illustrative example of cooperation in ELF. 
 
(13) 
S6: yeah (S5: yeah) they could go yeah and also they increased the time for er 
parental [er] 
S1: [parental] leave 
S6: [yeah yeah and] (S1: [yeah yeah]) so for for for men [they]... 
 
Here S6’s hesitation (er) seems to trigger S1’s helping response, which completes the 
term (parental leave) S1 was apparently in need of. 
 As a final step to wider contexts, ELF speech shows speakers making use of 
their shared cultural resources. Some of these are manifest in simple linguistic 
borrowing, as in (14), and in academic environments these borrowed items are often 
terms, like here. 
 
(14) 
…if that m- mentalité if that s- social fabric surrounding it doesn't work, then 
 … this tradition of ostpolitik is that this really demands for steady erm talks 
dialogue and cooperation 
 
Sometimes the culturally transmitted resources point to older origins, with the same or 
similar expressions known in many cultures. In these cases (15), it is not so important 
to follow the exact conventional English form to share the meaning across speakers. 
 
(15) 
…a way of controlling us sort of eh I don't know divide and govern sort of a 
thing 
…I don’t know what’s the hen and what’s the egg 
 and shared linguistic resources 
 
As this section has illustrated, ELF features can be seen at many levels of language, 
and successful communication is clearly an outcome of the interplay of several 
different strategies that speakers draw on to achieve mutual intelligibility and to 
jointly construct communication. ELF speech shows that in terms of linguistic 
systems, processes of simplification and complexification are both at work, and there 
is no reason to assume that an overarching simplification of English will result from 
its expanding second-language use. However, we can expect further changes to take 
place. The typical approximations that are found in ELF have the effect of enhancing 
the inherent fuzziness in language processing, and it also serves to loosen up 
conventionalised units. Such loosening paves the way for new preferences. The next 
section illustrates how this may be taking place. 
 
4. What does ELF contribute to English? 
 
It would seem that at the very heart of ELF-induced changes in English are 
phraseological sequences, or multi-word units of meaning. Their crucial role in 
holistic processing was already outlined above, and the current section illustrates with 
an example how new preferences arise in connection with units of this kind. 
A multi-word unit of meaning that is common in academic discourses, particularly in 
presentations, consists of the fixed unit let me and a verb of communication (let me + 
Vcomm), as in let me say a few words about the solution. 
A number of different communicative verbs can occupy the Vcomm slot, but 
some are preferred over others, or more frequent. In the ELFA corpus, the top 
frequency verbs are GO, ASK, SAY, TELL, PUT, BEGIN, and ADD, in this order. If we 
again make a comparison with the MICASE corpus, the verb list is the following: 
TELL, GIVE, ASK, SAY, LOOK, TAKE, and SHOW. What these preferences show is that a 
preference for TELL, ASK and SAY is shared. Moreover, in addition to these verbs 
which in themselves carry communicative import, both lists also include generic verbs 
(GIVE, TAKE, and SHOW in MICASE and GO, PUT, and BEGIN in ELFA), which are 
more context-dependent, and have other senses in addition to the communicative. 
This finding goes against the assumption that more generic-sense verbs are used in 
ELF than ENL as tentatively reported in Seidlhofer (2004). Both corpora also 
manifest a number of one-off-occurrences, which shows that both ELF and ENL 
speakers exploit the resources of English creatively for their purposes. 
Staying with the same example, let me say a few words about the solution, but 
moving to look at a different part of it, we can observe another characteristic tendency 
in ELF. This time let us look at ENL (MICASE) first. A corpus search of words about 
brings up a fixed cluster, as we can see in the concordance lines in (16). 
 
(16) 
• gonna say a few words about why this problem is difficult 
• let me say a few words about the solution. um... in my 
• conclude with a, few words about Hilbert and his problems 
• just a few words about the planning committee 
• solve, and a few words about the solution, and then 
 
In contrast, what we see in ELFA is more variety (17). 
 
• can be delay also in that er then a few words about the restrictions , you have 
• parts of some some places er first few words about the background er this 
• thanks well can you say couple of words about the sources or the reference 
• you have you have done , then some words about the thickness of the book 
• then if we open book er say some words about the nomenclature that you 
• you are (xx) . (xx xx) okay er some words about the state of the art in 
• verified with experiments and some words about er the aspects the contents 
• influences of er the past , now some words about the problem (xx) 
• er i'm at last i'm going to , say some words about the library information so 
• way yeah most important then some words about app- theoretical approach 
 
But looking at (17), there is not only more variety showing the break-up of a fixed 
conventional ENL cluster, but also a new preference arising: some words about was 
the most frequent expression in the ELF data. Vetchinnikova (2014) has carried out an 
in-depth investigation of second-language users’ adoption of multi-word units of 
meaning, observing the processes of approximation and the settling on a particular 
alternative; she calls this tendency to settle on an expression ‘fixing’. The present 
instances come from different speakers on separate occasions and with vastly 
different first language backgrounds. This is an illustrative example of other similar 
cases in ELFA (Mauranen 2012); it shows how ELF ushers in new phraseological 
practices and expressions. In this way, through processes of approximation and fixing, 
we can assume English frequency patterns gradually undergo changes, with the effect 
of altering people’s perceptions of use. This presumably spreads new preference 
patterns among speakers. 
 
5. Where is English going? 
 
In conclusion, this paper has given a brief glimpse into the processes that English is 
currently undergoing in the hands of its major new speaker group, people usingit as a 
lingua franca. The language contact that is involved was seen to be of an unusually 
complex kind, second-order language contact between similects, as was suggested. 
Despite certain crucial differences between similects and dialects, there are also 
distinct affinities: like dialect contact, similect contact also means contact between 
mutually comprehensible varieties, or lects. It can reasonably be assumed that contact 
of this kind is far less dramatic than contact between two different languages. The 
processes of dialect contact, such as simplification, dialect levelling, and reallocation 
(Trudgill 1986) can be assumed to appear in ELF as well. Some indications of these 
were already perceptible, the clearest tendency being that of simplification, which 
presumably is the easiest to detect at early stages of contact. However, simplification 
was not without its counterpart, complexification, even in those morphosyntactic 
instances where it was discernible. Lexical simplification was somewhat surprising, 
and it certainly suggests further questions to be explored with regard to particular 
kinds and circumstances of language contact. 
 It is reasonable to assume that dialect levelling, that is, the loss of marked and 
minority forms, is likely to affect certain facets of Inner Circle Englishes, and that the 
first victim is likely to be opaque idioms. This is very hard to observe taking place, 
because what does not appear is obviously not detectable. Idioms are largely local and 
vary between Inner Circle countries as well, so that increasing contact between their 
varieties is in itself likely to result in levelling in this respect. Here we already saw 
plausible processes in operation that are likely to bring about change in currently 
conventionalised multi-word units of meaning: approximation and fixing. 
 A facet of changing English that has been little researched hitherto is written 
text. Academic publishing is likely to exert a strong influence on the practices and 
changing perceptions of ‘good text’. For the moment, the biggest country in scientific 
publishing is the U.S. (Royal Society 2011), but close on its heels is China, which has 
already surpassed the U.K. Japan ranks fifth on this list, after Germany and followed 
by France. The fast risers are expected to come from rising economies. We shall soon 
be seeing a world of English as a lingua franca on a different footing in academic 
publishing. 
 English will keep changing as it has done throughout its history, with second-
language users as an increasingly important influence in the heavily globalised 
contemporary world. It is unlikely to supplant local languages in its function as a 
lingua franca, but to complement the linguistic diversity that lives on locally and 
regionally. The rate of change is harder to foresee – language change never takes 
place at even speed – but one might surmise that the magic number of three 
generations, which holds for a variety of social changes, including language shift 
might be something to go on in predicting major changes in the use and forms of 
English. At present, we are really talking about the first global generation of ELF, if 
we date it back to roughly the adoption of the Internet. The one thing we can predict 
with certainty is that English will keep changing. 
 
 
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