Non-standard features such as copula deletion have long been dismissed as learner errors or were interpreted as results of simplification processes in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and only recent publications tend to acknowledge the influence of language contact in ELF settings (cf. Schneider 2012). The present paper analyses tokens of copula deletion in the Asian Corpus of English (ACE 2014) with respect to speaker L1s, situational context and syntactic environment, with our results suggesting a correlation between copula usage patterns in the speakers’ L1s and constructions involving copula deletion found in ACE. Thus, opening up the field to ELF settings, our data confirm findings of previous studies such as Sharma (2009) that point to contact-induced copula usage in non-standard English(es).