Abstract
ABSTRACT This article claims that because English as a lingua franca (ELF) users sometimes orient to phones as something reminiscent of both phonemes and allophones, an ELF phonology exists. However, an ELF phonology necessitates modifying the traditional concepts of phoneme and allophone to account for the fact that ELF users are more often in Transient International Groups than speech communities. Specifically, this study examines pronunciation negotiations within which ELF users orient to some phonetic differences as semantically equivalent and to others as semantically different. Although traditional phonology would describe different phones that instantiate semantic equivalence as belonging to allophones of the same phoneme, and different phones that instantiate semantic difference as belonging to different phonemes, this study argues that these concepts are too tied to the notion of a language variety and its speech community to be applicable to an ELF phonology, and thus new nomenclature is warranted and necessary.
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