The Asian Corpus of English (ACE)

Abstract

Abstract As a lingua franca, English plays an extremely important role in Asia: there are more speakers of English in Asia than the total number of native English speakers. To study English as a lingua franca (ELF) in Asia, it is important to establish a large-scale representative spoken Asian ELF corpus. Inspired by the Vienna–Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), the first large-scale corpus of spoken ELF interactions in Europe, a project team in Asia led by Professor Andy Kirkpatrick compiled the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), a million-word corpus of spoken ELF interactions in Asia (https://corpus.eduhk.hk/ace). This chapter will introduce the overall design of the ACE corpus, the data collection methods, and the functionalities of the ACE online system. Some examples of ACE-based research will also be shown. This chapter aims to help those who wish to conduct research using the Asian Corpus of English.