Sexuality-Related Lexical (In)Visibility in Asian Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study Using the International Corpus of English (ICE)

This study examines the visibility and invisibility of sexuality-related terms in four Asian Englishes using data from the International Corpus of English (ICE). Drawing on Wilkinson’s (2022) sexuality-related lexical set and informed by scholarship on heteronormativity, the study analyzes the proportional visibility of 19 target lexemes across Englishes in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, and India. The findings show that only a small subset of terms (gay, lesbian, same sex, sexual preference, bisexual, and sexual orientation) appear in the corpora, and even these occur at low frequencies. Among these, gay emerges as the most recurrent. The remaining terms are not observed across the corpora, indicating a highly constrained lexical repertoire within the communicative contexts represented in ICE. These results demonstrate how lexical (in)visibility can be empirically observed and measured through patterns of limited presence and systematic non-occurrence. Although the study does not claim to establish ideological causation, the observed patterns may be consistent with broader discussions of heteronormativity and discursive boundaries. The analysis is limited by its reliance on general reference corpora, and future research should prioritize comparative studies that incorporate digital, community-based, and activist datasets to examine how sexuality-related vocabulary circulates beyond the genres represented in ICE.