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An updated version of VOICE 2.0 XML is available for download. The name of the download package has changed to "VOICE_XML_2.0.2.zip". This version includes some corrections to the tagset description of the headers, as well as a number of previously missing tokens for pronunciation variations and coinages. We recommend replacing previously downloaded versions with this version of VOICE XML. Many thanks to Ray Carey for his helpful feedback.

The VOICE XML download package has been updated to version 2.0.1. This update includes minor changes which concern the format of the derived text files.

The VOICE Team are delighted to announce further developments of the VOICE Corpus. VOICE POS Online 2.0 and VOICE POS XML are the first part-of-speech tagged and lemmatized versions of VOICE. VOICE is thus the first publicly accessible corpus of spoken ELF interactions to be annotated in this way. VOICE POS Online 2.0 is made available online for all registered corpus users. VOICE POS XML 2.0 is available for download as part of the XML download package, together with VOICE 2.0 XML. VOICE 2.0 Online and VOICE 2.0 XML are updated versions of the corpus with further revisions in the corpus texts.

The VOICE Team celebrates the release of VOICE POS and the update to versions 2.0

Barbara Seidlhofer gives an interview on the Austrian radio station "Ö1"'s programme "Von Tag zu Tag" on the topic of the ownership of English and ELF (listen here)

The VOICE team are delighted to announce that VOICE XML has been incorporated into the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) and is now available for download there.

Barbara Seidlhofer gives an invited keynote address on English as a Lingua Franca as negotiable language at a conference entitled 'Inglese Lingua Franca nell’ambito delle Relazioni Internazionali' in Venice.

Stefan Majewski has completed his Master's degree with the thesis entitled Design and implementation of a research infrastructure for a corpus of spoken ELF. Congratulations!

Barbara Seidlhofer gives an invited plenary address with the title '"Proficiency in English": the ELF perspective' at the ATECR/IATELF Conference in Brno.

Barbara Seidlhofer gives an invited lecture and seminar entitled 'ELF (English as a Lingua Franca): new perspectives on English' at Waseda University in Tokio.

Barbara Seidlhofer gives an invited plenary address entitled 'Anglophone-centric attitudes and the globalization of English' at AILA in Beijing. Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale and Marie-Luise Pitzl also attend AILA Beijing and give paper presentations on VOICE and ELF within the symposia 'East-West dialogue on English as a Lingua Franca, Part Two: ELF in Europe', convened by Jennifer Jenkins and Anna Mauranen and 'The VOICEs of Europe and Asia: diversity of data but harmony in approach', convened by Barbara Seidlhofer and Andy Kirkpatrick (see Presentations).

Barbara Seidlhofer gives an invited plenary address on translanguaging in ELF and takes part at a Round Table on 'Literacy, language teaching and social inclusion' at the IX Congresso Brasileiro de Linguistica Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro. (see Presentations)

Marie-Luise Pitzl attends the 12th International Pragmatics Conference in Manchester and gives an individual paper presentation on the functions of creative idioms and metaphors in ELF (see Presentations).

Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk and Michael Radeka attend ICAME 32 and give individual papers on VOICE XML and Part of Speech Tagging ELF data with TBL. (see Presentations).

The VOICE Team attend the 4th International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca and give individual presentations and poster presentations there. (see Presentations).

The Austrian news magazine Profil publishes an article entitled "Whatever works", based on an interview with Barbara Seidlhofer.

Barbara Seidlhofer, Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk, Marie-Luise Pitzl and Michael Radeka are pleased to announce that VOICE XML is now available for download. VOICE XML is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and includes all corpus texts in XML format as well as derived HTML and TXT versions of the corpus with reduced mark-up. For more information on VOICE XML see Availability.

The release of VOICE XML also marks the release of VOICE 1.1, an updated version of the corpus that includes minor revisions in some of the corpus texts. As of 5 May 2011, the web interface of VOICE Online is therefore updated to VOICE 1.1 Online.

Barbara Seidlhofer participates in a TV discussion on the role on English in the scientific community on the a science forum (alpha-Forum Wissenschaft) of the German TV sender BR alpha.

Marie-Luise Pitzl has completed her PhD studies and successfully defended her PhD thesis Creativity in English as a lingua franca: Idiom and metaphor. Congratulations!

VoiceScribe 1.0.2 has been released. This version of VoiceScribe fixes several bugs, most notably a bug that prevented audio files with non-English characters from being played.

Barbara Seidlhofer and her team members Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk, Marie-Luise Pitzl and Michael Radeka are pleased to announce that anonymised audio material is now available for 23 speech events. This material is freely accessible from within the VOICE Online interface after a free registration for the VOICE Online services. The audio material covers approximately 22 hours of field-recordings, which equals about 20% of the entire corpus. We trust that this new feature will further increase the value of VOICE for research. For detailed information on using the new audio features, please refer to the subsection audio files in Using VOICE Online.

Angelika Breiteneder changes her professional focus, but will continue to work freelance for the VOICE project.

Michael Radeka joins the VOICE Team. His area of expertise is computational and corpus linguistics. Michael will focus on developing a methodology for annotating VOICE with POS tags by applying different classifier combination systems.

Ulrich Greiner publishes an article in Die Zeit entitled "Ist Deutsch noch zu retten?". The article focuses on the future of German, but also addresses the role of English as a lingua franca in this context. Parts of the article are based on an interview with Barbara Seidlhofer.

Angelika Breiteneder and Ruth Osimk attend the 9th Teaching and Language Corpora Conference in Brno, Czech Republic. Angelika Breiteneder holds a paper on ‘ELF and ELT: Insights from VOICE' (see Presentations).

Stefan Majewski and Ruth Osimk attend ICAME 31. Stefan Majewski gives an individual paper on CorpusQuery, the infrastructure behind VOICE. Ruth Osimk gives a work-in-progress paper on the theoretical considerations of POS tagging VOICE (see Presentations).

The 3rd International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca takes place at the University of Vienna. Angelika Breiteneder and Marie-Luise Pitzl hold invited papers at young researchers' plenary panels, Stefan Majewski and Ruth Osimk give individual visual presentations (for all see Presentations).

Stefan Majewski attends the xmlprague conference and wins the FLWOR Foundation's XQuery competition.

Lucy Pickering and Barbara Seidlhofer chair a colloquium on "English as a Lingua Franca: Recent Theoretical and Empirical Developments" at the AAAL 2010 Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The colloquium includes presentations by Angelika Breiteneder and Marie-Luise Pitzl (see Presentations).

Barbara Seidlhofer and Henry Widdowson give an invited keynote on the use of English as a lingua franca in education at the APAC ELT Convention in Barcelona.

Austrian Radio Ö1 broadcasts an interview with Barbara Seidlhofer and Marie-Luise Pitzl as part of the programme 'Dimensions – The world of science'.

Marie-Luise Pitzl holds two lectures on ‘English as a Lingua Franca: exploiting a linguistic resource' and ‘Researching English as a Lingua Franca’ at the University of Verona, Department for English, German and Slavic Studies.

The VOICE Team is currently working on adding features to the corpus, especially investigating the possibility of extending the mark-up with POS-tagging and preparing selected sound files for release.

Marie-Luise Pitzl and Stefan Majewski hold a VOICE workshop on 'ELF Corpus Building' at the Research Centre into Language Education and Acquisition in Multilingual Societies (RCLEAMS) at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Barbara Seidlhofer holds a lecture on English as a Lingua Franca in relation to the conference theme ‘More security by means of multilingualism” at the Linguistic Symposium of the Language Institute of the Austrian Armed Forces (AAF) in Vienna. (see Presentations).

Barbara Seidlhofer holds a lecture about ELF and the creation of VOICE at the faculty of philology and culture (see Presentations).

This event marks the opening of the exhibition of the faculty of philology and culture "Die Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät im Spiegel ihrer Forschung (Projekte - Plattformen - Kollegs)", where the VOICE-project is represented with a poster.

The exhibition can be visited from June 26th until July 17th in the main university building.

Ruth Osimk joins the VOICE team. She focuses on POS tagging for ELF with the aim to extend the mark-up of the VOICE corpus.

The 3rd International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca will take place in Vienna, May 22-25, 2010. Please visit the conference website for updates.

Barbara Seidlhofer and her team members Angelika Breiteneder, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski and Marie-Luise Pitzl are delighted to announce that the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) 1.0 Online is now available as a free-of-charge resource for non-commercial research purposes.

VOICE 1.0 Online with (just over) one million words breaks new ground in that it is the first corpus of English as lingua franca (ELF) to become publicly available.

In order to access VOICE 1.0 Online, register for your personal user account and log in to search or browse VOICE.

The publication of VOICE 1.0 Online is also accompanied by corpus documentation, statistics and detailed user instructions for the online search interface, all of which can be accessed via this website.