This had been the de facto position for many
years (Krasnick, 1995), but the ASEAN Charter finally formalised
the use of English as ASEAN’s sole working language. This means
that people, whose first language could be any one of several
possible Asian languages, would use English as the official means
of communication. In this sense, then, English functions as a
lingua franca in these situations. It is important, therefore, that
we study this use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). To
paraphrase Mauranen, if we want to understand the use of
English in today’s world, ‘ELF must be one of the central
concerns in this line of research’ (2006, p.147). This is why a
team has been collecting the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), described
in more detail in the following section.