ABSTRACT
This chapter provides reconceptualizations of English as a lingua franca (ELF) not only from the perspectives of linguistic and communicative multiplicity and fluidity but also from decolonial and Southern epistemologies. Decolonial perspectives enable delinking from the Eurocentric norm which determines scholarly understandings of language and communication in a hegemonic manner (Pennycook and Makoni 2020). For almost 40 years, applied linguists have been addressing perspectives of linguistic fluidity and multiplicity. For example, scholars have scrutinized the ownership of English (Widdowson 1994), proposed the concept of world Englishes to highlight local varieties of English (Kachru 1985), and introduced translingualism which rejects rigid boundaries of named languages (García and Li 2014). These multiple and fluid perspectives are aligned with decolonial epistemologies that disrupt Eurocentric thinking. Decolonial perspectives can further enrich ELF research on multilingual communicative practices by recognizing multilingual and multimodal communicative repertoires holistically, rather than separately (Matsumoto 2019). Furthermore, decolonial perspectives question the supremacy of English and call for future research to consider diverse linguistic contexts and communities beyond the global North. Importantly, we also caution against reducing decolonization to a mere slogan to be celebrated or essentializing differences. Decolonial reflections offer new ways of studying lingua franca communication in multilingual societies.
