Variation in English on the internet and its implications: an empirical study of web registers in South Asian countries

Basic data for this project

Description

Linguistic interest in the internet as a medium of communication is as old as the internet itself. Despite the increasingly multilingual nature of the internet, the influence and dominance of English as the main language of communication has remained unchanged in this medium. In the past decade or so English linguists have more and more turned towards the internet as a source of data collection and to study the development and spread of English in this context. These attempts have been restricted in several ways like geographical region and registers considered. The present research project aims to study English on the internet originating from a geographical region and registers that have been neglected previously. The overall aim is to study the current development of English on the internet in South Asian countries (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Tools and methods provided by corpus linguistics are proposed to perform this study. The following sections provide details in this regard.