The East African component of the International Corpus of English

The project

The project started in 1989 with research on linguistic variation in East African English and contributed to a broad interdisciplinary project on "Identity in Africa" at the University of Bayreuth, which was supported as a Special Research Programme by the German Research Association (DFG). We continued this project at the department of English language and linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology. A data bank has been developed jointly with our African partners and now comprises hundreds of spoken and written texts by speakers and writers in different situations and contexts. The project was completed in 1999, when a web interface was created so that the corpus can be searched directly. The manual and the texts are also available on the latest ICAME CD.

The Kenyan and Tanzanian components of this database have now become the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). The following team of researchers were responsible for the compilation of ICE-EA: Diana Hudson-Ettle, Barbara Krohne, Josef Schmied.