The universal tongue: Charting the rise of english as a Lingua Franca through bibliometrics

ELF stands for English as a Lingua Franca and is defined as the use of the English language as a common tool of communication among people of different native languages. This bibliometric study on ELF utilizes Scopus for bibliographic data and employs Biblioshiny, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace software for analysis. It provides an overview of the different aspects of ELF research, including annual scientific production, identification of the most relevant authors and sources, trend topics or thematic mapping, historiographs, topic dendrogram, keyword co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling of documents, cocitation of cited authors, and country collaborations. The results obtained reveal its important growth and a strong increase in the last years in terms of publications and citations. This has led to the recognition of key authors and sources that have been influential and contributed much in the field. The trend topics reflect the dynamism and interdisciplinarity of ELF research, particularly on computational linguistics and teaching. Thematic mapping identifies themes as either motor, niche, emerging or declining, or basic, which gives a breadth-of-field view of research themes. It also highlighted some knowledge gaps, underinvestigated niche themes and a need for further development of basic themes. Practical implications include the whole range of topics in the integration of technology into ELF research and practice, along with interdisciplinary collaboration and policy development that assists in fostering ELF education. This paper allows one to look back through the history and evolution of the research into ELF and draw attention to certain key areas that should be visited and explored in the future.