ABSTRACT
The use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) manifests many features that differ from standard varieties, as do many regional and World English varieties. This has not hampered communication among its users. On the contrary, it is highly successful, as shown in the substantial body of ELF research. However, almost all ELF evidence so far comes from speech, and critical voices insist that, while spoken language may tolerate a certain amount of non-standardness, the same is not true of written text. Writing requires standards and precision to get its message across, the thinking goes, thus reflecting the general conservatism associated with writing. Language regulation in ELF shows related tendencies, with writing receiving more corrective comments than speaking. At the same time, academics stress the importance of comprehensibility over correctness and increasingly make it clear that their first priority is high-quality research over linguistic correctness. This chapter looks at the way academic texts take shape in ELF in the light of the WrELFA corpus (University of Helsinki) from three perspectives – the macro-social, the micro-social, and the cognitive – and argues that, at a general level, very similar processes are in evidence in writing as in speaking.
