On the Linguistic Behaviour of the Word "Variety" in ELF Studies

In recent years, a number of ELF theorists have endorsed the view that it is no longer tenable to lean on the idea of "variety" borrowed from the world Englishes (WE) paradigm to conceptualise "English as a Lingua Franca" (e.g. Seidlhofer 2018; Jenkins 2018a). To Jennifer Jenkins's mind, for instance, it is at present "clear" that "a 'variety' approach to ELF [is] inappropriate" as ELF interaction is "far too fluid, flexible and hybrid to be captured by the notion of bounded varieties" (2018b:28). The volume Changing English: Global and Local Perspectives, which was edited by ELF and WE scholars alike, is another instructive example: the "Languages and Varieties index" found at the end of this book does not feature the acronym "ELF" (2017:340-342). Does this repudiation of "variety" however inevitably entail discarding the postcolonial ethos on which the concept originally rested? In other words, are WE tenets such as "indigenisation", "linguistic independence from native English" and "legitimation" thus irrelevant to ELF theorising nowadays? In this paper, I intend to examine the ways in which the word "variety" has been used in theoretical texts on ELF, with the aim of finding out whether other avatars of its tenets have emerged in early and late articulations of "English as a Lingua Franca". Indeed, while the term "variety" and the key ideas that it conveys might eventually be cast aside, its initial ideological orientation may be permeating different definitional aspects of "ELF" to this day.