ABOUT ME
WELCOME TO MY HOMEPAGE.
I am a Singaporean linguist and an Assistant Professor at the English Language and Literature department of the National University of Singapore. I spent a year at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow, after obtaining my PhD at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in December 2014. My stints at both institutes were aided by the Ministry of Education- National University of Singapore Overseas Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the National University of Singapore Overseas Graduate Scholarship.
I am Peranakan Chinese by birth, and am interested in my endangered heritage language, Baba Malay. I also carry out research on Colloquial Singapore English and other contact languages. I seek to understand language change brought about by multilingualism. My specific areas of interests lie in language endangerment, language death, language documentation, creoles, typology, and sociolinguistics. It is my hope that my training in linguistics will better prepare me to contribute towards the revitalization of Baba Malay. I also enjoy teaching, and I have taught a range of classes (intro to linguistics, intro to linguistics for engineers, semantics and pragmatics, child language, language documentation, and typology, to name a few). I welcome MA and PhD supervisees in the above areas, including supervisees who are interested in embarking on a sociolinguistics project, especially those focusing on contact or heritage languages; or in producing a grammatical description using the functional approach.
In Semester 1 of AY 2021/2022, I am on research leave (HSS Faculty Research Fellowship). I will resume my teaching duties in Semester 2.
Outside of academia, I enjoy travelling, bouldering, snorkelling, SCUBA, and good sci-fi.
RESEARCH
ENDDOC WORKSHOP SERIES
In semesters when I do not teach language documentation, I run a workshop on selected documentation tools. If you are interested in participating in these training workshops, do drop me an email.
PHD DISSERTATION
My PhD dissertation is a grammar of Baba Malay with sociophonetic considerations, and my committee members are Lyle Campbell (chairperson), Andrea Berez, Robert Blust, Katie Drager and Barbara Watson Andaya (external member).
Material collected from the field have been archived at Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai'i Digital Ethnographic Archive.
OTHER ONGOING PROJECTS
I am one of the co-developers of the Language Endangerment Index (LEI) that is used by the Endangered Languages Catalogue (endangeredlanguages.com). If you would like to find out more about LEI, please feel free to contact me.
I have a project that documents Kristang in Singapore (with the help of Frances Loke and Andre D'Rozario), and I am continuing with the documentation of Baba Malay (with the help of Nadine Ng and Gerald Choa). If you would like to participate in this research, I'd be happy for you to get in touch.
With regard to Baba Malay, I am studying how social meanings are encoded in the coarse-refined contrast in the language. Separately, I am also working on the language's aspectual system.
With regard to contact languages and language endangerment, I am interested in how and why
contact languages become endangered, and in highlighting the issue of endangerment where these languages are concerned.
My latest project with Cynthia Siew adopts a network analysis approach and a computational approach to the issue of language loss.
GET IN TOUCH
Address:
National University of Singapore
Department of English Language and Literature
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
National University of Singapore
Blk AS5, 7 Arts Link
Singapore 117570
Email:
nala.lee{at}nus.edu.sg