Language Change The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca

English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become ubiquitous in today's globalised, mobile and fast-changing world. It is clear that it will have an unprecedented impact not only on how we communicate but also on our understanding of language use and change. What exactly ELF brings to our life and to language theory is a question which requires an interdisciplinary take. This book gathers together leading scholars from world Englishes, typology, language history, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, multilingualism, sociolinguistics and ELF research itself to seek state-of-the-art answers. Chapters present original insights on language change, based on theoretical approaches and empirical studies, and provide clear examples of social, interactional and cognitive changes that ELF instigates. The picture which unfolds on the pages of this book is complex, dynamic and makes a convincing case for the importance of English as a lingua franca on language change at a global scale.

Introduction. Dynamics of change from different perspectives and on different scales Anna Mauranen and Svetlana Vetchinnikova; Part I. Pooling Perspectives: Introduction Anna Mauranen; 1. Calling Englishes as complex dynamic systems: diffusion and restructuring Edgar W. Schneider; 2. English as a lingua franca in the context of a sociolinguistic typology of contact languages William Croft; 3. How writing changes language Ewa Dąbrowska; 4. ELF and translation as language contact Anna Mauranen; 5. Present-day standard English: whose language was it anyway? Terttu Nevalainen; 6. ELF and the study of sociolinguistic change Janus Mortensen; Part II. Zooming in on ELF: Introduction Svetlana Vetchinnikova; 7. ELF, language change and social networks: evidence from real-time social media data Mikko Laitinen and Jonas Lundberg; 8. ELF and language change at the individual level Svetlana Vetchinnikova and Turo Hiltunen; 9. Are multilinguals the better academic ELF users? Evidence from a questionnaire study measuring self-assessed proficiencies Peter Siemund and Jessica Terese Mueller; 10. The role of co-textual and contextual cues for intelligibility in ELF interactions Veronika Thir; 11. Exploring the pragmatics of computer-mediated English as a lingua franca communication: multimodal and multilingual practices Rino Bosso; 12. Development of shared multilingual resources in ELF dyadic interaction: a longitudinal case study Aki Siegel; 13. The role of translanguaging in ELF advice sessions for asylum seekers Alessia Cogo.

Anna Mauranen is Professor and Research Director at the University of Helsinki, and President of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Her research includes ELF, academic discourses, corpus linguistics, translation, and modelling speech. She is co-editor of Applied Linguistics, and Changing English (2017), and author of Exploring ELF (2012) and Linear Unit Grammar (2006).
Svetlana Vetchinnikova is University Lecturer in the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki. Her current interests include chunking at different levels of language organization, individual variation and modelling language as a complex system. She is author of Phraseology and the Advanced Language Learner (2019) and co-editor of Changing English (2017).