Volume 5, Issue 2 - Special Issue: The Asian Corpus of English, Guest Editor: Andy Kirkpatrick

The ASEAN Charter refers to English as the “working language of ASEAN,” a situation different from the EU that has a multiplicity of official and working languages. It has been argued that English, as a foreign “working language,” does not have an emotive value to it as it has merely a functional role. This, however, may change as many people in ASEAN speak a particular variety of English, especially those from countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Brunei. Even in countries such as Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which had not been colonised by the British, many learn English today and see it as vital for survival in many domains and especially with the forming of the ASEAN community and ASEAN integration. This ASEAN English is different from the many varieties in the region in that it does not possess the national and ethnic characteristics that varieties do. ASEAN English appears to possess its own characteristic features, often with an avoidance of features that are found in national varieties to aid mutual understanding between members who come from different ASEAN societies. This paper examines informal interactions between ASEAN speakers from the Asian Corpus of English. It analyses the features that create rapport and illustrates that ELF has an emotive value and does not merely play a functional role in ASEAN.

This paper explores how speakers of English as a lingua franca (ELF) manage the interactional back-and-forth of teasing, a social action which, being fundamentally ambiguous, is open to interpretation by a target and/or other participants as aggressive in intent. The data reported here draw on the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), and describe some of the more typical teasing practices which occur among Asian ELF speakers in informal, non-task-focused contexts. More specifically, this research explores the interpersonal functions which teasing performs in ACE interactions; the teasing strategies commonly employed to serve these functions; and the responses of recipients to teases targeting them. The data show that teasing is a common practice in interaction among Asian ELF speakers, and is accomplished through a variety of strategies such as jocular mockery, jocular agreement with a target’s negative self-assessment, jocular insult, and banter. Significantly, teasing in ACE appears to be essentially jocular rather than conveying veiled aggression; markers such as laughter, heightened vocal pitch and lexical exaggeration are commonly employed to signpost the non-serious nature of such utterances. Teases are also commonly received as jocular by recipients; there are no instances of offense being expressed by a tease recipient.

Based on the Chinese component of the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), this study focuses on the lexicogrammar features of ELF by Chinese speakers in China–ASEAN communication contexts. It is found that non-standard forms do exist systematically in high distance social talk by the Chinese ELF users of comparatively high English proficiency. Examples and analysis are provided to illustrate the common non-standard lexicogrammar features in terms of lexical innovation, non-standard use of prepositions, the omission of subjects, objects and copula, grammatical disagreement, subject pronoun copying and tag question. These non-standard forms appear to be adopted due to mother tongue transfer, facilitation of communication or exploitation of language resources. However, no misunderstandings occur due to the non-standard forms.

Misunderstandings are natural occurrences in conversation. Though they are the exception to the norm, and furthermore they do not necessarily result in communication breakdown, they do sometimes occur, and it is important to find out what causes them. Deterding (2013. Misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca: An analysis of ELF interactions in South-East Asia . Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.) investigates misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in data from the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and discusses the role of phonological, lexical and grammatical features in causing them to occur. He reports that over 86 % of the tokens of misunderstandings in his corpus involve pronunciation. The current paper analyses this data further, specifically to determine the role of vowels, as Jenkins (2000. The phonology of English as an international language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.) has suggested that vowel quality is not important in English as a Lingua Franca, so she excludes vowel quality from the Lingua Franca Core, the set of pronunciation features that she suggests are important for maintaining intelligibility in an international setting. In fact, a total of over half the tokens of misunderstanding listed in Deterding’s Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca involve the quality of vowels, though in many cases this appears to be a minor factor. The current paper analyses these 98 tokens involving vowel quality in detail, to find out if some shifts in vowel quality are more important than others, and to investigate if vowel quality really is unimportant for intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca. It was found that vowel quality rarely causes a problem, and only in one token, in which the speaker was making a joke, is vowel quality the main factor causing the misunderstanding.

With the rapid economic development and the increasing activities in trade, education, cultural events, and tourism in Asia, more and more people are using English as a lingua franca (ELF). The Asian Corpus of English (ACE) project has, as one of its defining goals, the collection of a million-word corpus of naturally occurring speech in order to analyse and describe the distinctive linguistic features of Asian ELF and to identify shared features if any. However, little research has been done hitherto on the features of ELF in the Asian context. This paper, therefore, presents a description of the phonological patterns found in ELF. Specifically, the paper focuses, inter alia, on the monophthong vowels and rhythmic patterning in the spoken interactions of ELF speakers from the data as well as the implications for policy and practice of ELF in multilingual Asia. The study is based on the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) data collected in Singapore by the National Institute of Education (NIE) team. Participants in the study include speakers from China, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and India. The paper aims to deepen the boundaries of thinking about shared pronunciation patternings of ELF speakers in Asia and considers the implications of such shared patternings and norms on practice in multilingual Asia.

Building the Asian Corpus of English (ACE, 2014) involved complex interactions between researchers, participants, transcription conventions, software and hardware. The gathering and transcribing of naturally occurring conversations of English among Asian multilinguals was undertaken by a team of more than twenty researchers in nine locations across Asia. Modelled on the Vienna Oxford Corpus of English (VOICE), ACE faced unique challenges due to linguistic, cultural and geographical differences. These problems were solved through procedures and tools known as heuristics which were built on prior experience and also trial and error. The process of developing and categorising these skills are presented with experiences shared by ACE researchers and the author along with examples from the corpus.