Introduction

The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca, or ELF, as it is more often called, begins where it ends: by looking back to ELF’s earliest days. The very final chapter of the handbook, ‘The future of English as a lingua franca?’, starts by outlining ELF’s development from its beginnings – including the first time the acronym ‘ELF’ was actually used in public – to the present day, before gazing into ELF’s hypothetical future. Nobody, myself included, had any idea in those early days that ELF research, let alone the acronym that was then so often met with amusement and comments about ‘little green men’, would grow so rapidly into the vast, widely known and largely accepted research field that it is nowadays and is likely to remain into the foreseeable future.