From Australia to Zambia, from the Bahamas to Yemen, and from Tanzania to Germany, an increasing number of people all over the globe use English as a shared medium for communication. The number of English speakers is currently estimated at 1.5 billion in total (seeCrystal 2012a: 6; Eberhard et al. 2022), with ‘non-native’ speakers, who account for more than two thirds of all speakers of English, outnumbering ‘native’ speakers by far (see Eberhard et al. 2022).1 Global mobility, both long-term migration and short-term sojourns, as well as the rapid spread of the internet continue to bring people from different linguacultural backgrounds together, who – in need of a lingua franca – often resort to English in both real and virtual worlds (seeJenkins 2018: 600). Employed by speakers from most various geographical and social backgrounds in a wide range of domains, English as a Lingua Franca has grown into “a communicative tool of immense political, ideological, and economic power” (Kachru 1996: 910) and has gained a global influence unparalleled (seeSeidlhofer 2011: 3).
FollowingSeidlhofer (2011: 7), I understand English as a Lingua Franca (hence ELF) as “any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option [italics in original]”. While the use of ELF has become a globe-encompassing linguistic reality, “linguists, teacher educators, and teachers have been told, and have generally accepted, that ‘real English’ is ENL [i.e. English as a native language]” (Seidlhofer 2011: 23). Over the past two decades, however, a rapidly growing body of ELF research has contributed to making the sociolinguistic reality of ELF visible and accessible to academics and educators alike, exploring ELF from a variety of linguistic perspectives, with a recent emphasis on pragmatics and translanguaging (see e.g.Mauranen 2013; Cogo & House 2018).
Though universally employed, ELF has so far mainly been investigated in a restricted set of regions and domains: while previous studies have centred around business and academic ELF in European and Asian settings (seeSeidlhofer 2004: 221–222;Firth 2009: 149;Cogo 2016a: 89;Jenkins 2018: 596;Kaur 2022: 37–38), future research needs to incorporate additional domains and integrate data from further continents (see e.g.Kaur 2016a: 164–166). The pr
