English as a lingua franca

One theme that has accompanied accounts of English as a lingua franca is change, and attitude research has featured so prominently in ELF research because the changing linguistic landscapes observed have a closer connection with people’s thinking and practices than with the language forms themselves. Some early accounts of ELF considered how ‘the language’, or ‘varieties of the language’, would come to embody innovations from the millions of multilingual speakers using English globally (see Jenkins et al., 2011). In contrast, more recent accounts encourage a break from objectifications of language that have proliferated in some approaches to linguistics, especially as researchers investigating English as a lingua franca are obliged to consider contextual language use rather than abstract constructs of languages (see Baird et al., 2014), with multilingualism and translanguaging becoming more conspicuous in the literature (see Jenkins, 2015). This shift has, in our view, elicited a rich response in discussions of language use and theorisation of communication. The still-popular area of language attitude research, however, has retained relatively consistent approaches, functions and rhetoric despite such shifts in ideas of language and communication. This chapter seeks to address potential mismatches between current conceptualisations of language practices in the ELF field of enquiry and approaches to attitude research undertaken in this field. As the title suggests, it is our hope that dialogue opened here can lead to a change in the way perceptions of language are treated in the field in order to close this conceptual gap.