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Article published In: English World-Wide
Vol. 46:3 (2025) ► pp.274–298

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The YouTube corpus of Singapore English podcasts

ORCiD logo with link | University of Oulu
 | Sorbonne Nouvelle University
 | Paris-Cité University
 | University of Bonn
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the authors.

Published online: 9 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.25018.coa
Abstract
Recent advances in streaming protocols and automatic speech recognition (ASR) have enabled large-scale spoken language corpora, yet research on Singapore English remains constrained by small or text-based datasets. The YouTube Corpus of Singapore English Podcasts (YCSEP) addresses this gap with 620 hours of transcribed, diarized speech from over 1,300 podcast episodes by Singapore-based content creators. YCSEP supports the empirical analysis of phonetics, morphosyntax, and discourse, enabling the study of low-frequency features like discourse particles and reduplication. The dataset reflects informal, spontaneous speech from diverse speakers and facilitates investigation into nativization and endonormative stabilization processes in postcolonial English. Built using a pipeline of yt-dlp, WhisperX, and Pyannote, YCSEP offers robust empirical grounding for linguistic features such as verb complementation and modality. It also contributes to broader theoretical discussions on areal norms and construction grammar in World Englishes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Existing SgE resources
    • 2.1Written and mixed corpora
    • 2.2Speech corpora
    • 2.3Evaluation of existing corpora and databases
  • 3.Corpus creation: Data and methods
    • 3.1Podcasts included in the corpus
    • 3.2Data harvesting and corpus creation
  • 4.Corpus analysis of SgE features
    • 4.1Features associated with SgE
    • 4.2Other features
  • 5.Potential future use cases
    • 5.1Features associated with spoken language which are uncommon in writing
    • 5.2Phonetic features
    • 5.3Social variation in SgE
  • 6.Caveats, summary, and outlook
    • 6.1Limitations and caveats
    • 6.2Summary and outlook
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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