Resources

It is only recently that the study of ESLs has come to be seen as a productive sociolinguistic enterprise. Studies of individual varieties have often been based on written sources, both of published writers and of students’ writings at school and university. Convenient though this means of accessing data is, for psycholinguistic veracity it is preferable to focus on the spoken word. Most authors in the Africa-Asia have based their descriptions on speech samples or a combination of written (especially when summarizing previous research) and spoken data. Corpus Linguistics is beginning to make its presence felt in this area. The most influential corpora are the ICE Corpora (International Corpus of English) originating at the University of London.

The ICE corpora in East Africa under the directorship of Josef Schmied and in South Africa under Chris Jeffery have yielded significant data and analyses. Schmied describes the potential of the World Wide Web in gathering informal written data in the East African context. In India, the Kolhapur corpus is based on written Indian English. Other smaller-scale corpora are mentioned by individual authors.