Abstract :
Academia is in the midst of major upheavals: in a globalized world, competition for research funding, jobs, good students, and positions in international league tables is getting tougher - and while all this is going on, linguistic landscapes are being turned about. Students, teachers, and researchers are eminently mobile, making their lives and careers in different locations. English has become the unquestionable global lingua franca. At the same time, most scientists and scholars today find themselves in multilingual environments, where people move skilfully between languages, even if English is the most widely shared resource. How do we understand successful academic English in a world where the majority of its users speak it as an additional language? This paper looks into changing position and shape of English as a lingua Franca (ELF) in the academic world. ELF is a complex form of language contact, which is viewed from three key perspectives: the cognitive, the micro-social /interactional, and the macro-social. The talk draws on spoken and written academic ELF corpora, compiled at the University of Helsinki: the spoken ELFA corpus and the written WrELFA corpus. It is argued that academics make good use of their varying repertoires of English in co-constructing meanings and academic knowledge.
