English as a Lingua Franca and World Englishes: Tracing the Roots of ELF and its Connection with the World Englishes Paradigm

Recently, the relationship between English as a Lingua Franca and world Englishes has become a hotly debated issue. At the heart of this dissension lie the criteria of form and function commonly invoked to either align ELF with WE, or to distinguish it from this research area: some scholars maintain that ELF is a linguistic system characterised according to a set of features, just as varieties of English are in WE studies, whereas others believe ELF to be a new role assigned to English in a global context. ELF is then either regarded as part of the WE paradigm, or it is considered to belong to a different framework. Through a close analysis of seminal texts on ELF (Jenkins 2000, 2007; Seidlhofer 2001, 2011), I argue that "the most crucial node to disentangle in the discourse about ELF" is in fact more complex than "the seemingly interchangeable way in which the two meanings [form/function] are attributed" to the label (Saraceni 2008:24). Rather, I contend that it is the discourse about ELF as a whole that is slippery, both in terms of what is explicitly said about the category ELF and, perhaps even more interestingly, in terms of what is implied about it. Indeed, I aim to show that the concepts that Jenkins and Seidlhofer use to describe ELF, such as that of "language and culture", do not always appear to be in line with the postcolonial ethos at the core of the WE paradigm.