Kiasu

This paper presents a study of usage patterns of the word kiasu in the GloWbE corpus of World Englishes. Kiasu has been borrowed from Hokkien into Singaporean and Malaysian English as a linguistic ‘glocalization’ process enabling speakers to verbalize an important local cultural schema. A grammatical profile is set up that draws on the techniques of grammatical profiling and constructional profiling. While patterns can be identified and linked up with specific construals of the underlying cultural schema, the study ultimately also questions the validity of the parts-of-speech classes that traditional English grammarians operate with.