ELF and corporate identity: a case study focusing on companies’ websites

The unique tools of the Internet allow organizations to reach an unpredictably wide audience. A single common language, namely English, is often used as a lingua franca, to facilitate the communication process among different parties who do not share the same mother tongue. The present study focuses on a corpus of web-mediated texts released by seven European companies which have chosen English as the lingua franca for international communication. The study integrates corpus linguistics and discourse analysis perspectives, in the attempt to investigate the extent to which the features of ELF displayed in the companies’ websites can actually contribute to conveying their corporate identity. The discussion of the findings will eventually show that each company tends to adapt the lingua franca. The adopted changes include both common patterns employed by most of the companies under scrutiny, as well as individual features, influenced by the companies’ national languages and cultures.