Habib Kiani Raouf - MA in English Teaching, Zahedan, Parastar Street, Behzisti Applied Sciences University

In recent years, the term ‘English as a lingua franca’ (ELF) has emerged as a way ofreferring to communication in English between speakers with different first languages. Sinceroughly only one out of every four users of English in the world is a native speaker of thelanguage (Crystal 2003), most ELF interactions take place among ‘non-native’ speakers ofEnglish Although this does not preclude the participation of English native speakers in ELFinteraction, what is distinctive about ELF is that, in most cases, it is ‘a ‘contact language’between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture,and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication’ (Firth 1996: 240).Inthis paper we aim to discuss on the reasons that caused the English language to find his wayas the common language of international affairs from five viewpoints: enrichment oflanguage itself, population of speakers, political and economic power, official language ofmany nations, International trade, language of science, mass media, computing and publishedjournals and tourism

lingua franca, linguistic globalization, English language