“Specially in the last years…”: Evidence of ELF and non-native English forms in international journals

While the number of research articles written by non-native speakers of English and published in English-medium international journals is on the rise, little is known about the extent to which that trend may be affecting the way in which English is used in that genre. To address this gap, a corpus comprising 192 non-native English articles published in 8 different international journals, spanning two different time periods (2000–2005 and 2010–2015), was compared with a parallel native-speaker corpus from the same journals and of the exact same characteristics. Analysis of the various word and phrase lists generated by the corpora show that there are a number of lexical items used by non-native authors that are used significantly less by native speakers — if at all. The identified items were shown to be used by several different nationalities, and consistently attested in the majority of the journals sampled. Moreover, comparison between the two time periods reveals that all items have become increasingly accepted over the years. It is concluded that this exploratory study merely scratches the surface in terms of the extent of ELF that may be present in international academic publication. Directions for future research are suggested. •Evidence of non-native English usage in published research articles is presented.•The evidence is generalizable across several nationalities and international journals.•There is an apparent growing acceptance of such “English as a Lingua Franca” items.•More research into ELF in international research publication is warranted.