English has been referred to as a lingua franca for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As the region moves towards establishing the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), the diversity of pronunciation of the ASEAN member states is seen as a forefront issue for English language teaching (ELT). From a sociocultural perspective, this study…

This paper focuses on designing a comprehensibility test and a questionnaire for spoken world Englishes in Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, and utilizing the test to investigate the comprehension of Burmese, Cambodians, Indonesians, Laotians, Thais and Vietnamese. We reviewed the demarcation of users of English based on Kachru's…

The predicted widespread use of English as a lingua franca following ASEAN's 2015 integration mushroomed intelligibility studies between and among Asean nationals including Bruneians, Burmese, Cambodians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Laotians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Thais and Vietnamese. Previous studies regarding ASEAN nationals' intelligibility…

This article examines the distributional pattern of signs in the linguistic landscape of a neighbourhood in the commercial district of Phonm Penh, Cambodia. Informed by the frameworks of ethnolinguistic vitality and ethnocultural stereotypes, it discusses the developing multilingualism from socio-economic and historical perspectives. An analysis…

The Mekong has long attracted interest although it remains economically insignificant. A group of riparian states known as the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS)--Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan Province (China)--now manage aspects of regional development including trade, water management and education. Standard GMS discourse…