The ability to control the light-matter interaction in the deep subwavelength regime has fascinating consequences for material sciences and a range of photonics technologies. The statistical properties of emerging fields strongly depend on both the source of radiation and specific characteristics of the material system. Here we consider the coherence properties in the proximity of surfaces illuminated by strongly randomized optical fields and demonstrate that the spatial extent of near-field correlations depends on the density of defects in two-dimensional crystalline lattices. We also show that this effect can be used as an efficient elastic scattering method to characterize the density of defects in two-dimensional crystalline materials. Systematic experiments demonstrate the relationship between the spatial coherence length of scattered light and a characteristic length associated with structural disorder in graphene. The fact that one single layer of atoms can modify properties of electromagnetic radiation could lead to new means of controlling light at subwavelength scales and has implications for the emerging field of two-dimensional materials. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America