ELF in Thailand: Variants and coinage in spoken ELF in tourism encounters

Abstract

Globalisation has a great influence on the emergence of English as a lingua franca (ELF), particularly in tourism contexts. This paper reports on a piece of research that investigated variants and coinage in spoken ELF interactions between Thai locals and foreign tourists on Koh Lanta, Krabi. The nature of tourism encounters was brief and practical. That is to say, the primary focus was to exchange tourism information athough interactional encounters also occurred. In this study, the utterances in English produced by Thai locals when interacting with foreign tourists were collected and then analysed to identify distinctive features of pronunciation and lexicogrammar, including coinage which was used commonly. The findings provide that the forms of ELF in tourism contexts more or less vary from other contexts of ELF use. The findings of this study lie in the notion that the communicative practices of ELF are context-bound communication.