English in Taiwan - Forms and Functions

Joint project with PD Dr. Jakob Leimgruber (University of Freiburg/University of Basel)

In this project, Jakob Leimgruber and I investigate the variety of English used in Taiwan by compiling a corpus of spoken English in Taiwan.

Apart from studies on language planning and policies (e.g., Simpson 2007; Price 2014), research output on English in Taiwan remains few and far between, is usually anecdotal, and, additionally, often already outdated (Hsu 1994; Chen 2006). In one of the very few recent publications on English in Taiwan, Seilhamer (2015) describes the English use by his six female participants as “exud[ing] confidence, active agency, and indeed a sense of ownership [of English]”. This indicates that English is indeed actively employed by (at least) parts of the Taiwanese society, despite English having no official status within the country. Systematic, corpus-based studies of these Taiwanese uses of English, which take into account large samples of authentic language data, have not been conducted so far, however, and thus Taiwanese forms and functions of English remain a completely blank spot on the map of World Englishes.

The compilation of a large-scale corpus of spoken English in Taiwan is therefore a crucial first step in describing the variety under scrutiny which can then be used to examine the Taiwanese English variety in more detail. This research on English in Taiwan is direly needed; first of all, to advance our knowledge of the forms and functions of English in East Asia but also in order to allow comparisons between different East Asian English varieties.

I spent two weeks in Taiwan in October 2019 and collected pilot data for a spoken Taiwanese English corpus (funding by DFG, see below). Transcriptions of the audio recordings have been completed and we are currently preparing them for publication in a repository.

Ultimately, we aim to reproduce my South Korea study in the Taiwanese context: eventually, a sample of 115 participants from a variety of demographic backgrounds will be interviewed in face-to-face conversations in informal settings.

Funded by

DFG (German Research Foundation) research grant LE 3136/4-1 for the project ‘English in Taiwan – Forms and functions’. € 7,880. [co-PI with Jakob Leimgruber]; 2019-2021 [extended due to COVID-19].

Project Publications

Rüdiger, Sofia, Jakob R. E. Leimgruber and Ming-i Lydia Tseng. 2022. "English in Taiwan: Expanding the Scope of Corpus-Based Research on East Asian Englishes." English Today. First View: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078422000062. (OA)