ABSTRACT
Despite its being a relatively new area of inquiry, the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has spurred those of us in the language professions to rethink some fundamental concepts: two of which are the nature of language and the ideology of native-speaker privilege. Offering assistance in rethinking these is Complexity Theory (CT). Complexity Theory itself has only relatively recently been taken up in the physical sciences, but it has since been widely applied to the social sciences as well. It is a metatheory of and for our times. I begin by introducing CT as a metatheory; then, I discuss how the study of ELF supports and is served by viewing language as a complex adaptive system (CAS). I turn next to the inherent challenge to native-speaker privilege in this view. Before concluding, I briefly discuss design features for an ELF research agenda informed by CT.
