As the focus of this journal makes clear, the English language has a major presence in South,East and South East Asia. Bolton (2008) suggests that there may be as many as 812 millionusers of English in the region. Both McArthur (2003) and Kachru (2005) regard English asan Asian language and World Englishes studies have documented many varieties of AsianEnglishes. Furthermore, English functions as an official lingua franca in ASEAN(Association of South East Asian Nations) and ASEAN +3 (which includes China, Japan andS. Korea). This paper will offer a brief overview of the role of English in one country withinthis region, Thailand. An ELF perspective will be adopted as the most appropriate and justifications for this given. Furthermore, it will be suggested that many of the implicationsof this ELF approach have yet to be fully explored both in relation to characterisations of thelinguistic landscape of Thailand and educational policy.