English as a Lingua Cosmopolitana (ELC): A historical-typological complement to the study of English as a lingua franca

English as a Lingua Cosmopolitana (ELC) is proposed as a historical-typological complement to ELF research, arguing that late-modern global English may require more specific positioning than the cover term ‘lingua franca’ alone provides, and that this can be pursued through a comparative design using earlier transregional prestige codes as comparands. Lingua cosmopolitana (LC) is defined not as a different kind of lingua franca (LF), but as a historically unusual, socially expansive configuration of LF use of a linguistic code, one in which practice becomes predominantly (and in some historical cases fully) L2–L2 and the code tends towards default selection when no shared vernacular exists. Drawing on a typology of LFs, a historical-sociolinguistic account of cosmopolitanisation as a developmental path followed by some LFs and comparative analyses of Sanskrit, Latin and Classical Arabic as historical LCs, the paper uses the ELC perspective to clarify how English differs from most other LFs as a matter of degree and to foreground historical continuities relevant to its hypercentral position. It thus offers auxiliary terminology, a comparative frame and an alternative method for investigating late-modern developments that ELF research captures interactionally but does not model at the level of macro-typology. The paper concludes by assessing how far contemporary English approximates this upper-end LF profile and by specifying what the ELC perspective adds.