Researching English as a Lingua Franca in Asia: the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) project

The major role of English in Asia today is as a lingua franca. English is the de facto lingua franca of the grouping of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and with the signing of the ASEAN Charter in February 2009 assumed official status as the sole working language of ASEAN. English is also the working language of the extended grouping known as ASEAN + 3, which includes the ten states of ASEAN plus China, Japan and Korea. To date, however, little research has been done into English as a lingua franca in Asia. In this article I shall describe the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) project in which a number of teams across East and Southeast Asia are collaborating. Our aim is to compile a million-word corpus of naturally occurring, spoken, interactive English being used as a lingua franca in Asia. A team led by Professor Seidlhofer of the University of Vienna has just completed the VOICE corpus, a million-word corpus of European ELF. The Asian ELF team will ensure, as far as possible, that the Asian corpus is comparable with the VOICE corpus, in order to enable researchers to compare the features and use of Asian ELF with those of European ELF.