NESSI (New Englishes Student Interviews) is a corpus project that aims to collect spoken data produced by young speakers of New Englishes (institutionalized second-language varieties of English). It is built according to the same design criteria as LINDSEI, thus allowing for the comparison between Learner Englishes and New Englishes. It is made up of informal interviews with university students, which consist of three tasks: set topic, free discussion and picture description. The same transcription guidelines as those used in the LINDSEI project are applied. Unlike most corpora of New Englishes, detailed information is available about the (socio)linguistic profile of each speaker. The interviews are video-recorded, which provides access to additional communication modalities as compared to most New Englishes corpora, and hence offers further possibilities of investigation.
NESSI currently comprises two components: one for Hong Kong English, compiled by Gaëtanelle Gilquin, and one for Singapore English, compiled by Yating Tao.
International partners are encouraged to get in touch with us if they wish to participate in the NESSI corpus by collecting a subcorpus in their own national variety of English.
Project director:
Gaëtanelle Gilquin
The Louvain NESSI team:
Gaëtanelle Gilquin
Yating Tao
How to cite:
Gilquin, Gaëtanelle (2024) Lexical use in spoken New Englishes and Learner Englishes: The effects of shared and distinct communicative constraints. In Bertus van Rooy & Haidee Kotze (eds) Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings (pp. 120-152). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.