Developing an online specialised corpus of Pakistani English
Fatima Tuz Zahra, Tehseen Zahra, Akhter AbbasThis paper describes the creation of the 14.6 million word Pakistani Local English Corpus (PakLocCorpus). The corpus consists of representative non-native English used in Pakistan from the fields of literature, media and academia. The corpus is available through an online portal, with concordance searches enabled, and this paper highlights the potential of the corpus for English language users, language policy makers, English language teachers, learners, and curriculum developers. The paper highlights the challenges faced during the processes of corpus building which may help corpus developers interested in purpose-built corpus building. The significance of the complex linguistic phenomenon of Urduised words that call for manual annotation is also highlighted.