The role of English as a lingua franca in ASEAN means
that English is primarily used between multilinguals whose first
languages comprise a variety of Asian languages and who have
learned English as an additional language. There is no need for
such people to approximate native speaker norms. In the ASEAN
context, what is therefore important for an ASEAN speaker is
not to sound British or American when speaking English, but to
be mutually intelligible when communicating with their ASEAN
counterparts. There is an important identity dimension to this.
In spoken English, an insistence on standard forms needs to be
replaced by an insistence on mutual intelligibility. And, as the
ACE data described above suggests, the use of non-standard
verbal forms is actually less frequent than in vernacular varieties
of British English.