ABSTRACT
Because English is the official language of international aviation communication, Aviation English is commonly viewed as a type of English as a lingua franca: It is widely used across the world, the users are mainly second language speakers of English, it differs from standard forms of English in multiple ways, and first language speakers of English often struggle to adhere to its norms (so-called Standard Phraseology and Plain English). There are, however, good reasons to resist labelling it as a lingua franca: It is not so much an emergent form of language use as a highly regulated set of practices; it is a limited repertoire rather than a set of unbounded linguistic resources, and this repertoire is common across languages. It is therefore better understood as communication in aviation rather than communication in English. This observation has important implications not only for the teaching and use of language in aviation contexts but also for an understanding of ELF and applied linguistics more generally, since it raises questions about the effects of using labels such as ‘English’ in discussions of communication and reverses the priority we give to questions of communication in relation to particular languages.
