Complexity of english as a multilingua franca: Place of monolingual standard English

Abstract

While monolingual Standard English ideologies circulate in Japanese and other societies (Yano, this volume), how is this idealised English theoretically related to global communication? The answer to this question would be key for the real-world applications of ELF studies, including pedagogy. The present chapter seeks to identify the role of monolingual Standard English, however it is defined, in today’s ubiquitous multilingual scenarios with English. For this purpose, the chapter first problematises the ideological nature of English as a monolithic construct and then offers current thinking in the field of ELF, namely the theory of English as a Multilingua Franca (Jenkins in Engl Pract 2:49-85, 2015), which arguably subsumes those of transculturality (Baker, 2018) and transmodalities (Hawkins in Appl Linguist 39:55-77, 2018a). After re-examining the above construct and theories through the meta-lens of complexity theory (Larsen-Freeman, 2018), the chapter finally identifies the important but limited place of monolingual Standard English for English users in this twenty-first century.