English as a Lingua Franca

Abstract

The phenomenon of English as a lingua franca (ELF), in other words English used among speakers who have different first language backgrounds, has existed since the British began to colonize parts of Asia and Africa in the late 16th century. However, it is only during the past thirty years that ELF has spread to the rest of the world, seen a dramatic rise in its number of users, and attained its current global status. Unsurprisingly, then, research publications on the ELF phenomenon are also relatively recent. Like the phenomenon that it explores, research into ELF has also grown, particularly since the start of the current millennium, in terms of the amount being published as well as an expansion in the areas of interest being reported. Thus, whereas the original research into ELF focused entirely on linguistic forms, particularly phonological and lexico-grammatical, current ELF research explores a host of domains from tourism, to business, to higher education among many others, as well as a wider range of linguistic areas including ELF pragmatics, metaphorical language, and morpho-syntactics, along with various other English language-related topics such as intercultural communication, ELF in social contexts, humor in ELF interactions, assessment of ELF, and implications for teacher education. In addition, the first corpora of ELF use began to be collected, most notably Mauranen’s Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) and Seidlhofer’s Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), with Kirkpatrick’s Asian Corpus of English (ACE) following a few years later. Meanwhile the ELF phenomenon has been reconceptualized in line with the findings of its growing body of research. Nevertheless, ELF research is still in its infancy by comparison with most other areas of academic inquiry, and to date there is therefore only one overview publication, one journal, and no reference works, bibliographies, textbooks or the like. This bibliography is therefore divided according to the key areas in which publications on ELF have focused up to now.