Worldwide communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is enacted between people from different linguacultural backgrounds, so it would seem self-evident that it is inter cultural in its very nature. Pragmatically, however, it is not essentially different from “monolingual” / “intracultural” communication. In both cases, participants have to bring their diverse linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions into convergence on common ground. To conceive of this diversity as relating only to different named languages and the cultures associated with them is to disregard the vast variation in linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions that obtains within so-called monolingual communities. So to describe the use of ELF as exceptionally multilingual and intercultural is to misrepresent it as a distinct way of communicating. What makes ELF distinctive, and a significant area of study, is not that it is a different kind of communication, but on the contrary, that it so clearly brings out how communication works in general: since the degree of linguistic and schematic disparity between participants is likely to increase the challenge of convergence, the pragmatic process of achieving convergence will naturally become particularly apparent.