Language Change: The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca

by Anna Mauranen (Editor), Svetlana Vetchinnikova (Editor)

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.

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Published December 17, 2020

About the author

Anna Mauranen is Professor of English at the University of Helsinki. Her main research focuses on English as a lingua franca, modelling spoken language, corpus linguistics, and academic discourses. She is co-editor of Applied Linguistics and founding co-editor of the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca. She is currently director of a collaborative language and brain research project <"Chunking in language: units of meaning and processing (CLUMP)>", corpus-based research projects on spoken and written academic English as a lingua franca (ELFA & WrELFA, www.helsinki.fi/elfa ), and the director of a research consortium on Global English.