In global migration settings lingua franca English is essential in first and survival communication. For migrants to northern European countries where lingua franca English works as ‘contact language’ in ‘contact zone meetings’, it is useful as communication means and resource for acquiring typologically alike host-country languages. Uising the notion of affordances, this inquiry aims at generating a list of how English can ease and limit social interaction and Swedish learning. Interviews with 14 newly arrived migrants with English in their repertories disclosed the existence of empowering and limiting affordances in classroom, cognitive, social and material fields. Debating the findings, it is proposed that the ways in which individuals adapt to an affordance related to English, regarding it as either empowering or limiting, depends upon their actual motivational and affective state and in-the-moment cognitive processing. Keywords: affordances, ELF, global English, migration, Sweden, language mode theory, individual differences