English is the dominant lingua franca of the late 20th and 21st century. The involvement of speakers of various language backgrounds and levels of proficiency, however, means that English as a International or Global Language is marked by a great amount of variation in terms of phonology, grammar, lexicon, and pragmatics. While previous research focused to a great extent on English as a spoken lingua franca, the present study investigates readers’ reactions to grammatical variation in English as a written lingua franca.<br /><br />

In an elicitation task, native and non-native speakers of various language backgrounds assessed the acceptability of non-standard structures in a constructed lingua franca text. The results revealed not only what morphosyntactic variants bear a great risk of being rejected in international communication, but also what passes as correct or incorrect English