EXAMINING THE ENGLISH USED IN CLASSICAL BALLET DANCERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

This study investigates the use of English in classical ballet contexts by analysing classical ballet dancers’ biographies in a specialised corpus, the Ballet English Corpus (BEC, Ver. 1.2). While specialised corpora have been developed for various professional domains (e.g. air traffic control, business, medicine), few exist in the field of fine arts, particularly in classical ballet. Despite the increasing international mobility of Japanese classical ballet dancers—many of whom study or perform overseas—limited linguistic resources are available to support their English language needs, particularly in writing biographies for applications to classical ballet schools or companies abroad. This study presents a lexical and phraseological analysis of classical ballet dancers’ biographies in the BEC (Ver. 1.2), including n-grams, to identify common and typical linguistic patterns. The findings aim to support classical ballet dancers in composing clear and appropriate English biographies, contributing to both English for specific purposes research and practical English language education in classical ballet contexts.