ELF: English as a lingua franca
The Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), a collection of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) currently under construction, defines lingua franca as an additionally acquired language system that serves as a means of communication for speakers from different speech communities, who use it to communicate with each other but for whom it is not their native language.
Early findings from the VOICE corpus tentatively identify a number of features which point to systematic lexicogrammatical differences between native-speaker English and ELF, for example dropping the third person present tense ‘s’ (e.g. she wear), omitting definite and indefinite art...