Research Assistant (Linguistics)

About the role

The Linguistics and Multilingual Studies programme at the NTU School of Humanities is looking for a full-time Research Assistant to support the grant-funded project Bridging history and structure: Formal approaches to family-internal contact morphosyntax across Austronesian. The project investigates understudied Austronesian languages in Singapore, Indonesia, East Timor and beyond, including Singapore Colloquial Malay, Baweanese, Helong, Meto, Amarasi, Hawu and Kupang Malay. The assistant will collect and analyse qualitative data, liaise with collaborators and community members, and prepare project outputs for archiving and dissemination.

Key responsibilities

• Coordinate interview scheduling and administer consent procedures in line with ethics requirements.
• Transcribe, annotate and process audio-recorded interviews using language documentation software for analysis and archiving.
• Organise, maintain and manage project data (recordings, metadata, transcriptions, fieldnotes) securely and according to archival standards.
• Support literature review tasks, including establishing baseline grammatical descriptions for Malayo-Polynesian languages from published sources.
• Supervise junior student assistants.
• Help prepare project reports, documentation and other community-facing outputs.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Linguistics or a related field.
• Proficiency in English and Malay or Indonesian, written and spoken, in colloquial and standard registers.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively, with attention to detail and good organisational skills.
• Entry-level candidates are welcome; only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

Required skills

• Prior experience in linguistic annotation, transcription, analysis or related language research and software (e.g. FLEx, ELAN) is an advantage.
• Familiarity with qualitative data collection (including interviews) and basic data management is preferred.
• Strong understanding of research ethics and/or experience with community-oriented research is desirable.