Is English an Asian Language?

Abstract

The Asian Corpus of English OverviewThis chapter provides an introduction to the Asian Corpus of English (ACE)how it was collected and why and how it will be used in this book. As such, this chapter is relatively technical and will be of particular interest to those readers who wish to undertake research using the Asian Corpus of English.ACE was designed to be comparable with the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (Seidlhofer 2011). The participants recorded in ACE are primarily, but not exclusively, first-language speakers of Asian languages, while the participants in VOICE are primarily, but not exclusively, first-language speakers of European languages. ACE contains some one million words of naturally occurring, non-scripted face-to-face interactions (around 120 hours of recorded speech) of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in Asia. A wide range of speech events have been included in ACE. These include interviews, press conferences, service encounters, seminar discussions, working group discussions, workshop discussions, meetings, panels, question-and-answer sessions and conversations. The transcribed speech events are categorised under five major settings with their percentage of the corpus data in brackets: education (25 per cent); leisure (10 per cent); professional business (20 per cent); professional organisations; (35 per cent); and professional research/science (10 per cent). The corpus data have been tagged following the transcription conventions originally developed by the VOICE team. These tags enable users to obtain a clear picture of the transcribed data (e.g., pauses, overlaps, pronunciation variations & coinages), and make ACE and VOICE comparable. In October 2014, ACE was officially launched online. Users can browse the corpus data according to the five types of setting (previously mentioned) or according to the various data collection sites (Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, Mainland China and Taiwan). A Web concordancer has been developed which allows users to search any word/phrase in ACE. Other than searching the corpus, users can also listen to the sound recording of certain ACE files. These functions have made it possible for researchers and teachers/learners to explore the ACE data for various research and pedagogical purposes.

The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes: A Book review

“…As it was natively used by, following categorization conceptualized by Braj Bihari Kachru (1990), inner circle countries (English as L1), the speakers of outer circle (English as L2) and expanding circle (English as a foreign language, EFL) have outnumbered the native speakers (Kirkpatrick & Sussex, 2018). The cultural, geographical, and physical distinctions of speakers worldwide may shape and transform linguistic features (Kirkpatrick & Lixun, 2021). It leads to varieties of English.…”

A study of students' reading engagement and perception of eil materials

“…English speaker's identity refers to the identities people belong to and the significance of mutual intelligibility of the use of English in preference to accomplish correct or native-like English (Lee & Chen Hsieh, 2018). According to Kirkpatrick and Lixun (2020), mutual intelligibility referred to the communicative activity that was understandable for each other although nonstandard forms were used sometimes. Also, being a native speaker had no relationship with mutual intelligibility (Kirkpatrick & Lixun, 2020).…”

“…According to Kirkpatrick and Lixun (2020), mutual intelligibility referred to the communicative activity that was understandable for each other although nonstandard forms were used sometimes. Also, being a native speaker had no relationship with mutual intelligibility (Kirkpatrick & Lixun, 2020). However, people do not have to sound like English's native speakers.…”

“…Therefore, the idea of native speaker pronunciation is ambiguous. According to Kirkpatrick and Lixun (2020), the expanding role of English as an international lingua franca indicated more and more people who were multilinguals learned English as an international language using English at international levels (Kirkpatrick & Lixun, 2020). It is obvious that several English accents and pronunciations are countless.…”