ELF Users’ Perceptions of Their ‘non-nativeness’ in Digital Communication Through English: Falling Short of the Target?

English is nowadays largely used as a shared code of communication among users of different first languages in a broad range of international contexts. English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) studies have become a flourishing field of research, particularly over the last couple of decades, investigating how English is employed in its lingua franca role across several domains, from academia to international mobility, business and other areas. More recently, interest in how ELF is used in written and, particularly, digital settings has been growing, given the significant surge in computer and Web-mediated communication, and the participatory characteristics of Web 2.0 environments. Despite the internet being a multilingual environment (e.g. Danet and Herring 2007; Crystal 2006), English continues to represent one of the major languages of communication, above all in its lingua franca function, allowing people of different linguacultures to connect and communicate across linguistic, cultural and spatial boundaries. Although research into ELF as employed in digital media is still a developing field (cf. the WrELFA 1 corpus, Carey 2013; Mauranen 2013; Franceschi 2014; Vettorel 2014; Vettorel and Franceschi 2016) it can be foreseen that, with more than 3.5 billion users of the Internet (Internet World Stats2) as of today, academic interest in how ELF is employed in digital environments will further expand. Recently, some ELF-related studies have explored metalinguistic comments pertaining to ELF users’ self-perceptions of their competence in English, both in face-to-face (Jenkins 20073; Motschenbacher 2013; Hynninen 2013; Cogo and Jenkins 2010; Kalocsai 2009, 2014) and in online digital environments (Franceschi 2014; Jenks 2013; Vettorel 2014). The main aim of this paper is to explore ELF users' perceptions of their ‘non-native’ use of the language in web-related environments, either as a pre-emptive move, or when producing non-normative forms, in the EnTenTen corpus. Such perceptions will be investigated through a mainly qualitative approach, aiming at shedding light on how they are expressed and the purpose they fulfill in digital environments, mainly in connection to the conceptualization of the non-native speaker as a permanent learner, always falling short of the unattainable target of native-like proficiency.