The status of English in the Expanding Circle has been of significant interest in recent years. The use of English by Slavic speakers in Post-Communist space, especially in light of the EU enlargement, has nevertheless been largely ignored. This paper aims to present evidence of the emergence of Eastern European English (EEE) in European language contact situations. The questions addressed in the study are, first, how Slavic speakers of English render a temporal-aspectual plane in a lingua franca discourse, and, second, what constitutes an authentic lexical mosaic of EEE. Spoken production data (Tübingen Corpus of EEE: 60,000 words) and introspective data were elicited from fifteen native speakers of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Slovak. The analyses suggest that EEE is indeed emerging. In contrast to native speakers of English, Slavic speakers possess a limited repertoire of English tenses. The English simple past and the past progressive, for example, are used to render Slavic categories of imperfective and perfective aspect. Eastern European English seems to be a product of an interrelation of various speaker-specific dimensions, such as the speakers' L1, and their communicative competence in L3.Actually, I love languages, and if to speak about languages, I can't say that English is language for me. [ . . . ] And if to say about English I spoke English very often with people who are not native speakers, that is why I have more feeling that it's just the language for the world, but not it's not, for me it's not something like language of USA or England' (ELF Data, L1 Ukrainian). EASTERN EUROPEAN ENGLISH IN A LINGUA FRANCA CONTEXTAs the use of English by Eastern European and Russian speakers in the ELF context has not been looked at in full detail (for some studies on Slavic English see Proshina and Ettkin 2005; Ustinova 2006;Proshina 2010), it was decided to examine the emerging Eastern European English (EEE) variety, initially focusing on such first languages as Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Slovak; and describe its lexical and grammatical features. The fact that Russian and Eastern European speakers shared a similar history and politics in the past, cultural and social values as well as similar post-Soviet transition processes allowed us to classify emerging local English varieties under the rubric of 'Eastern European English'.Where linguistic features are concerned, Slavic languages, especially East Slavic -Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, and West Slavic -Polish and Slovak, share similar characteristics. A rich morphology, which is primarily fusional, free word order, rich agreement systems (nouns with adjectives and nouns with verbs), and the category of aspect (internal representation of time within events) to name a few, are salient features of Slavic languages (Comrie and Corbett 2002). Being an official language in Russia and in the newly independent states, Russian has been a lingua franca in the post-Soviet space and in the emigrant communities worldwide. Ukrainian, which is an official languag...

The attitudes of Slavic speakers towards English accents have been under-researched. The only language and accent attitude research in the Slavic context with the involvement of Polish speakers was conducted by Jenkins in her questionnaire study (Jenkins, 2007). The study, whose interest lay in assessing native and non-native English accents, showed a strong attachment of non-native speakers toward native varieties and accents of English, although non-native speakers mostly used English for communication with other non-native speakers of English.

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