ABSTRACT
This chapter recognizes the fluidity of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as a resource employed primarily by multilingual speakers who perform in "transient multilingual communities". It focuses predominantly on the well-documented morphosyntactic commonalities that emerge in ELF interactions as well as the processes behind them. The chapter reviews the now well-known features reported from empirical ELF studies along with a review of the features of different varieties of English covered in the World Englishes paradigm, showing a considerable degree of overlap. The linguistic diversity present in ELF settings naturally reflects itself in several areas, including variation in morphosyntactic use. The chapter highlights the need to problematize the theoretical construct 'variety' on empirical grounds. Taking into account the overlap of features from varieties covered in World Englishes, and what has been suggested previously in literature about stabilization and spreading, a problematization of variation and variety does not seem irrelevant.
