English as a lingua franca in Europe: an empirical perspective

In 2008, the need for intra-European communication has long exceeded the limits set by language barriers. As a result, English acts extensively as a lingua franca among Europeans with different mother tongues, particularly so in the professional domains of education, business, international relations and scientific research. Yet, despite its omnipresence, English as a lingua franca (ELF) in Europe has not generally been recognized as a serious object of linguistic enquiry and has indeed often been dismissed as a defective form of English. Drawing on the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), this paper presents an empirical analysis of one particular, but symptomatic, feature of naturally occurring ELF data, namely the verbal -s suffix - 'the 3rd person -s'. The findings presented suggest that the occurrence of this feature follows general principles of language usage that have been observed in numerous varieties of English around the globe and indicate affinities between ELF and various world Englishes (WEs). The paper, consequently, proposes that ELF in Europe is an entirely natural development in the glocalization of the language, and points to synergies that could be gained from a truly collaborative effort of researchers in WEs and ELF.