Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English

Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English
http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/index.php

In the early 21st century, English in the world finds itself in an “unstable equilibrium”: On the one hand, the majority of the world's English users are not native speakers of the language, but use it as an additional language, as a convenient means for communicative interactions that cannot be conducted in their mother tongues. On the other hand, linguistic descriptions have as yet predominantly been focusing on English as it is spoken and written by its native speakers.

VOICE seeks to redress the balance by providing a sizeable, computer-readable corpus of English as it is spoken by this non-native speaking majority of users in different contexts. These speakers use English successfully on a daily basis all over the world, in their personal, professional or academic lives. We therefore see them primarily not as language learners but as language users in their own right. It is therefore clearly worth finding out just how they use the language. This is exactly what VOICE seeks to make possible.