ABSTRACT
When I was invited to contribute a chapter to this very timely volume, the title given to me was ‘Competing paradigm: English as a lingua franca’. However, the reviewers of my chapter, wisely, in my opinion, recommended changing it to better reflect the position being presented. For although the paradigms of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and World Englishes (WE) are sometimes considered to be in competition with one another, as will be discussed at length in this chapter, I do not agree. Rather, it is my view, coming from an ELF perspective, that ELF and WE are not competing, but complementing, paradigms. In other words, although some WE scholars perhaps consider the ELF paradigm to be engaged in some type of ‘competition’ with the WE paradigm, ELF scholars themselves originally saw ELF as an ideological and linguistic extension of WE rather than a rival, and nowadays see ELF and WE as referring to two different but complementary linguistic and cultural phenomena (see also Ishikawa, 2016 on this point), albeit that the two paradigms continue to have shared ideological underpinnings.
