Comparing written Indian Englishes with the new Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes (CORINNE)

This article introduces the new Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes (CORINNE). The current version of CORINNE contains news and other text types from regional Indian newspapers published between 2015 and 2020, covering 13 states and regions so far. The corpus complements previous corpora, such as the Indian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) as well as the Indian section of the South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE) corpus, by giving researchers the opportunity to analyse and compare regional (written) Englishes in India.

In the first sections of the paper we discuss the rationale for creating CORINNE as well as the development of the corpus. We stress the potential of CORINNE and go into detail about selection criteria for the inclusion of newspapers as well as corpus compilation and the current word count. In order to show the potential of the corpus, the paper presents a case study of ‘intrusive as’, a syntactic feature that has made its way into formal registers of Indian English. Based on two subcorpora covering newspapers from Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand, we compare frequencies and usage patterns of call (as) and term (as). The case study lends further weight to the hypothesis that the presence or absence of a quotative in the majority language spoken in an Indian state has an impact on the frequency of ‘intrusive as’. Finally, we foreshadow the next steps in the development of CORINNE as well as potential studies that can be carried out using the corpus.