World Englishes and Corpora

Abstract

The first part of the chapter surveys the traditional corpus-linguistic working environment for the study of varieties of English around the world, focussing on the International Corpus of English (ICE) as a major cooperative venture. The second part assesses the potential of larger digital text archives and the World-Wide Web as additional sources of data for the study of World Englishes. Corpora and digital text databases not only serve as rich and convenient sources of data, but also encourage a specific corpus-linguistic “take” on World Englishes and are thus also important for advancing the theoretical debate in the field. Analysis of traditional corpora has deepened our understanding of the nature of morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes as a whole and of fine-grained variety-internal variablility determined by medium (spoken vs. written), genre and style, whereas the use of Web data frequently highlights the role of standard and nonstandard Englishes in transnational and global domains. The chapter ends with a plea to develop corpora documenting World Englishes in their multilingual settings and thus bring together research on World Englishes and the related field of the sociolinguistics of globalisation.