ABSTRACT
Despite its being a relatively new area of inquiry, the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has spurred those of us in the language professions to rethink some fundamental concepts: two of which are the nature of language and the ideology of native-speaker privilege. Offering assistance in rethinking these is Complexity Theory (CT). CT itself has only relatively recently been taken up in the physical sciences, but it has since been widely applied to the social sciences as well. This chapter begins by introducing CT as a metatheory. It discusses how the study of ELF supports and is served by viewing language as a complex adaptive system (CAS). The chapter briefly discusses design features for an ELF research agenda informed by CT. One of the issues in accounting for ELF is to overcome a way of thinking about language that has been inherited from linguistics, that is, a static, atomistic view.
