Problems, however, start to emerge when one
considers that the data collected for such corpora
tend to be restricted to English. While this may
seem like an obvious methodological decision
given the focus of studies being a particular variety
of English, or more generally, World Englishes (and certainly the ICE corpora are primarily concerned with English), it remains the case that
there are few places in which English is used as
the only language. More often than not, English
co-exists with other languages: for instance,
Singapore English lives side by side with
Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, and a host of varieties
of Chinese, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan; Welsh
English obviously co-exists with Welsh and
South African English with Afrikaans, with the
nine other official languages, as well as with sixteen other spoken languages (Lewis, 2009). The
relationship between English and these languages
is never one of simple side-by-side co-existence.
Rather, speakers use them concurrently to greater
or lesser extents, switch from one to the other
and back, and regularly draw on elements or features from several of these languages in order toindex certain social meanings. Although the extent
of multilingualism differs across speakers, ‘pure’
monolingualism is non-existent, if we take into
account even token knowledge of non-English
words or phrases by speakers in such settings.