The Asian Corpus of English (ACE): Asian ELF tendencies

English is now used as a lingua franca (ELF) by millions of speakers around the world. Indeed, ELF speakers have outnumbered the native English speakers significantly, and as a result, ELF related research is gaining more and more attention. Recently, a team of researchers led by Prof. Barbara Seidlhofer have successfully developed the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), and have made it publically available online at http://www.univie.ac.at/voice. It is the first computer-readable corpus (one million words) capturing spoken ELF interactions in Europe. The aim of the VOICE project is to open the way for a large-scale and in-depth linguistic description of European ELF. In response to this, a team of researchers in Asia (led by Prof. Andy Kirkpatrick) is currently compiling the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), the Asian counterpart of VOICE. In this presentation, details of the development of the ACE corpus will be reported, and a preliminary linguistic description of common Asian ELF tendencies identified in ACE will be given, and these tendencies are compared with the European ELF features already identified by the VOICE team. It is hoped that the study will shed light on the identification of common linguistic features in Asian and European ELF. Copyright © 2012 University of Helsinki. All rights reserved.