All Affiliates
Dr Lisa Lim
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr Lisa Lim

BA NUS; PhD Reading

Contact Information

Email

lisa.ls.lim@gmail.com

Profile

Dr Lisa Lim graduated from the National University of Singapore with a First Class Honours in English Language, and went on to do her PhD in phonetics at the University of Reading. She returned to the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore in 1996 as Lecturer/ Assistant Professor. In 2004 she exchanged balmy breezes for North Sea winds to be at the University of Amsterdam, for a year at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences, and then as senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of English and the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication (ACLC).

2009 saw her returning, thrilled, to tropical Asia, where she joined the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. As Coordinator of the Language and Communication (L&C) programme, a position she held for 7 years from September 2009 until August 2016, she revamped L&C's profile, turning its lens onto today's multilingual, globalised world, and introducing in the programme learning experiences such as fieldwork in local minority communities, field trips, a vibrant internship scheme, and knowledge exchange with the community. She was also Chair of the Departmental Research Postgraduate Committee from September 2014 until August 2016, during which time she helped develop a more engaged environment and created more visible platforms for the research activities and achievements of the School's research postgraduates. She took on the role of Head of the School of English from September 2016 until she left HKU and HK in June 2018. Some of her accomplishments during her Headship include driving the development of the fulltime mode of the taught MA programme, reinvigorating meaningful connections with alumni, and creating a vibrant School profile on social media. She assumed her position as Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney in January 2019, and still maintains her relationship with the School with her Honorary position, research postgraduate supervision, and collaborations and friendships with colleagues.

Her current research interests – reflected in her teaching and supervision – centre around: New Englishes, especially postcolonial Asian varieties in multilingual ecologies, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, with particular interest in contact dynamics, involving both sociohistorical and linguistic investigation; phonetics/ phonology/ prosody; language documentation; and issues of language shift, endangerment, revitalisation, and post-vernacular linguistic and cultural vitality in minority and endangered language communities, such as the Peranakans in Singapore and the Malays of Sri Lanka; and the sociolinguistics of globalisation, with interests in mobility, urban multiculturalism, computer-mediated communication, and their impact on language contact.

She was part of the team working on Sri Lanka Malay, supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung’s initiative for the documentation of endangered languages (2004-2009), and she recently brought to completion a project on The Ecology and Evolution of Asian Englishes, funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (2012-2015). She is currently a collaborator in the World Universities Network (WUN) project on Understanding Globalisation – Margins and Peripheries. She has edited a number of books and special issues, in particular on both structural and sociolinguistics aspects of English in Asia. Her recent book, Languages in Contact (2016, co-authored with Umberto Ansaldo) is published with Cambridge University Press in their Key Topics in Sociolinguistics series

She is founding editor (with Umberto Ansaldo) of the new journal Language Ecology. She serves on the editorial boards of Language, Culture and Curriculum (Taylor & Francis), Language Sciences (Elsevier), Journal of Second Language Pronunciation (John Benjamins), World Englishes (Wiley-Blackwell); and the Faculty Advisory Board of Mercury, HKU Journal of Undergraduate Humanities.

Lisa is passionately committed to and actively engages in knowledge transfer. She developed the online resource LinguisticMinorities.hk, for which she won the HKU Faculty of Arts’ Knowledge Exchange Award 2014. She contributes (since July 2016) a fortnightly column 'Language Matters' for the South China Morning Post's Sunday Post Magazine, which aims to give readers a more nuanced appreciation for the sociohistorical ecologies and contact dynamics that underlie the origins of words, phrases and language practices in Hong Kong and the region, such as chit, chop, junk, chai, add oil, kiasu, tuk-tuk, have you eaten?, as well as address issues pertaining to minority language communities, language endangerment, migration, and language rights. Her columns can be accessed at http://www.scmp.com/author/lisa-lim

Lisa has been interviewed for her work in various media:

'Hongkongers mix English and Cantonese into new language, Kongish'. South China Morning Post (Lifestyle feature), 21 January 2016.
http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1903452/hongkongers-mix-english-and-cantonese-new-language-kongish

'HK Profile: Dr Lisa Lim, Founder of LinguisticMinorities.hk'. Time Out Hong Kong, 4 November 2015 (online 12 November 2015).
http://www.timeout.com.hk/big-smog/features/74790/hk-profile-dr-lisa-lim-founder-of-linguisticminoritieshk.html

'Add oil! The evolution of Hong Kong English and where our unique words come from'. Post Magazine, South China Morning Post, 28 June 2015.
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1825528/add-oil-evolution-hong-kong-english-and-where-our-unique?page=all

'Speech therapy'. HKU Bulletin, Vol 16, No 1, The University of Hong Kong, December 2014.
http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2014_Dec_Vol.16_No.1/knowledge_exchange/page2.html

'The many languages of Hong Kong'. KE Newsletter, Issue 6, The University of Hong Kong, April 2014.
http://www.ke.hku.hk/newsletter/issue6/languages

'Research and teaching staff of the School: A presentation of Dr Lisa Lim'. School of English Alumni, The University of Hong Kong, 2 September 2013.
http://www.english.hku.hk/alumni/10636/research-and-teaching-staff-of-the-school-a-presentation-of-dr-lisa-lim/

'English as she will be spoke', Michael Erard. New Scientist, 29 March 2008.

Publications

For downloadable articles, go to my Academia.edu webpage http://hku-hk.academia.edu/LisaLim

Books and special issues 

Lim, Lisa and Umberto Ansaldo. 2016. Languages in Contact. (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics.)Cambridge University Press.

Lim, Lisa, Christopher Stroud & Lionel Wee, eds. Contracted; in prep. The Multilingual Citizen. Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change. (Encounters.) Multilingual Matters.

Goh, Robbie, Lisa Lim & Lionel Wee, eds. 2013. The Politics of English in Asia: Language Policy and Cultural Expression in South and Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. (Studies in World Language Problems 4.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. 2011. The Typology of Asian Englishes. (Benjamins Current Topics 33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee, eds. 2010. English in Singapore: Modernity and Management. (Asian Englishes Today.) Hong Kong University Press. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. 2009. The Typology of Asian Englishes. Special Issue, English World-Wide 30(2). [Link tovolume TOC]

Lim, Lisa & Ee-Ling Low, eds. 2009. Multilingual, Globalising Asia: Implications for Policy and Education. AILA Review 22. [Link to volume TOC and abstracts]

Ansaldo, Umberto, Stephen Matthews & Lisa Lim, eds. 2007. Deconstructing Creole. (Typological Studies in Language 73.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Saldin, B.D.K. In collaboration with Lisa Lim. 2007. Kamus Bahasa Melayu Sri Lanka. A Sri Lanka Malay–Malay–English dictionary. Colombo; Frankfurt/ Nijmegen: Volkswagen Stiftung/ DoBeS.

Lim, Lisa, ed. 2004. Singapore English: A Grammatical Description. (Varieties of English Around the World G33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Link to volume TOC]

Language corpora 

Lim, Lisa and Umberto Ansaldo. 2013. Singlish structure dataset. In Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath and Magnus Huber, eds. Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://apics-online.info/contributions/21

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2011. Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish). In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://www.ewave-atlas.org/

Ansaldo, Umberto, Lisa Lim & Sebastian Nordhoff. 2000-2014. Sri Lanka Malay. Documentation of Endangered Languages (DoBeS). Volkswagen Stiftung. http://dobes.mpi.nl/projects/slm/

Lim, Lisa. 2001. The Grammar of Spoken Singapore English Corpus (GSSEC). National University of Singapore.

Journal articles and book chapters 

Forthcoming/ in preparation

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. forthcoming. Citizenship theory and fieldwork practice in Sri Lanka Malay communities. In Lisa Lim, Christopher Stroud & Lionel Wee, eds. The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change. (Encounters.) Multilingual Matters.

Lim, Lisa. forthcoming. The art of losing: From java and patois to post-vernacular vitality — Endangerment, empowerment and evolution in globalising Asian ecologies. In Martin Pütz and Luna Filipović, eds. Endangered Languages: Issues of Ecology, Policy and Documentation. (IMPACT Studies in Language and Society.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lim, Lisa. 2016. Multilingual mediators: The role of the Peranakans in the contact dynamics of Singapore. In Li Wei, ed. Multilingualism in the Chinese Diaspora World-Wide. (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism.) Routledge.

Lim, Lisa. 2015. Catalysts for change: On the evolution of contact varieties in multilingual knowledge economy. Ms. The University of Hong Kong.

Lim, Lisa. 2015. Singlish. In Rint Sybesma, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.

Lim, Lisa. 2015. Singapore: Language situation. In Rint Sybesma, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.

2013-2014

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. 2014. The lifecycle of Sri Lanka Malay. Language Endangerment and Preservation in South Asia. Special Issue, Language Documentation and Conservation 7: 100-118.

Lim, Lisa. 2014. Yesterday’s founder population, today’s Englishes: The role of the Peranakans in the (continuing) evolution of Singapore English. In Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch, eds. The Evolution of Englishes. (Varieties of English Around the World G49.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 401-419.

Lim, Lisa. 2014. Southeast Asia. In Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola & Devyani Sharma, eds. The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lim, Lisa. 2013. The politics of English (and Sinhala and Tamil) in Sri Lanka: Kaduva of privileged power, tool of rural empowerment? In Lionel Wee, Robbie Goh and Lisa Lim, eds. The Politics of English in Asia: Language Policy and Cultural Expression in South and Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. (Studies in World Language Problems 4.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 61-80.

Wee, Lionel, Lisa Lim & Robbie B.H. Goh. 2013. Conclusion. In Lionel Wee, Robbie Goh & Lisa Lim, eds. The Politics of English in Asia: Language Policy and Cultural Expression in South and Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. (Studies in World Language Problems 4.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 303-316.

2012

Ansaldo, Umberto and Lisa Lim. 2012. English in Asia. In Raymond Hickey, ed. Areal Features of the Anglophone World. (Topics in English Linguistics.) Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa. 2012. Standards of English in Southeast Asia. In Raymond Hickey, ed. Standards of English: Codified Varieties Around the World. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 274-293. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa. 2012. English and multilingualism in Singapore. In Carol A. Chappell, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2012. Contact in the Asian arena. In Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. New York: Oxford University Press. 560-571. [Link to volume]

2011

Lim, Lisa. 2011. Tone in Singlish: Substrate features from Sinitic and Malay. In Claire Lefebvre, ed. Creoles, Their Substrates and Language Typology. (Typological Studies in Language 95.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 271-287.

Lim, Lisa. 2011. Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone languages? In Lisa Lim & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes, (Benjamins Current Topics 33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 97-118.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2011. Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish). In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://www.ewave-atlas.org/.

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne. 2011. The typology of Asian Englishes: Setting the agenda. In Lisa Lim & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes, (Benjamins Current Topics 33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1-10.

2010

Lim, Lisa. 2010. Peranakan English in Singapore. In Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar W. Schneider & Jeffrey P. Williams, eds. The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 327-347.

Lim, Lisa. 2010. Migrants and ‘mother tongues’: Extralinguistic forces in the ecology of English in Singapore. In Lisa Lim, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee, eds. English in Singapore: Modernity and Management. (Asian Englishes Today.) Hong Kong University Press. 19-54.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2010. Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish). In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Electronic World Atlas of Variation in English: Grammar. Max Planck Digital Library in cooperation with Mouton de Gruyter.

Lim, Lisa, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee. 2010. English in Singapore: Policy and practice. In Lisa Lim, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee, eds. English in Singapore: Modernity and Management. (Asian Englishes Today.) Hong Kong University Press.

2009

Lim, Lisa. 2009. Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone languages? In Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes Special Issue, English World-Wide 30(2): 218-239.

Lim, Lisa. 2009. Beyond fear and loathing in SG: The real mother tongues and language policies in multilingual Singapore. In Lim, Lisa & Low Ee-Ling, eds. Multilingual, globalizing Asia: Implications for policy and education. Special Issue, AILA Review 22: 52-71.

Lim, Lisa. 2009. Not just an 'Outer Circle', 'Asian' English: Singapore English and the significance of ecology. In Thomas Hoffman & Lucia Siebers, eds. World Englishes: Problems, Properties, Prospects. (Varieties of English Around the World G40.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 179-206.

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne. 2009. The typology of Asian Englishes: Setting the agenda. In Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes Special Issue, English World-Wide 30(2): 123-132.

Lim, Lisa & Low Ee-Ling. 2009. Introduction. In Lim, Lisa & Low Ee-Ling, eds. Multilingual, globalizing Asia: Implications for policy and education. Special Issue, AILA Review 22: 1-4.

2007-2008

Lim, Lisa. 2008. Dynamic linguistic ecologies of Asian Englishes. Asian Englishes 11(1): 52-55.

Ansaldo, Umberto, Lisa Lim & Salikoko S. Mufwene. 2007. The sociolinguistic history of the Peranakans: What it tells us about ‘creolization’. In Umberto Ansaldo, Stephen Matthews & Lisa Lim, eds. Deconstructing Creole. (Typological Studies in Language 73.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 203-226.

Lim, Lisa. 2007. Mergers and acquisitions: On the ages and origins of Singapore English particles. World Englishes 27(4): 446-473.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2007. Identity alignment in the multilingual space: The Malays of Sri Lanka. In Anchimbe, Eric A., ed. Linguistic identity in postcolonial multilingual spaces Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 218-243.

2005-2006

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. 2006. Globalisation, empowerment and the periphery: The Malays of Sri Lanka. In Elangaiyan, R., R. McKenna Brown, Nicholas D.M. Ostler & Mahendra K. Verma, eds.Vital Voices: Endangered Languages and Multilingualism. Proceedings of the FEL X Conference. Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages; & Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. 39-46.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2006. Keeping Kirinda vital: The endangerment-empowerment dilemma in the documentation of Sri Lanka Malay. In Aboh, Enoch & Miriam van Staden, eds. ACLC (Amsterdam Centre for Language & Communication) Working Papers 1: 51-66.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2005. Countries and Languages –Asia In Brown, Keith, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed. Elsevier Publishers.

Ng, Sandy & Lisa Lim. 2005. Appreciating language contact in pronunciation teaching: Local languages’ effect on Singapore English. In Deng, Xudong, Victor Matthew Cole, Maria Luisa C. Sadorra & Wu Siew Mei, eds. Paradigm shifts in English Language teaching and learning. (Selected Papers from the Inaugural CELC International Symposium.) Singapore: Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore. 143-154.

2003-2004

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. 2004. Phonetic absence as syntactic prominence: Grammaticalization in isolating tonal languages. In Fischer, Olga, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon, eds. Up and down the cline – The nature of grammaticalization. (Typological Studies in Language 59.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 345-362.

Lim, Lisa. 2004. Sounding Singaporean. In Lim, Lisa, ed. Singapore English: A grammatical description. (Varieties of English Around the World G33.)Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 19-56.

Lim, Lisa. 2004. Everything you wanted to know about how stressed Singaporean Englishes are. In Burusphat, Somsonge, ed. Papers from the eleventh annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. Arizona: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State University.

Lim, Lisa & Joseph A. Foley. 2004. English in Singapore and Singapore English: Background and methodology. In Lim, Lisa, ed. Singapore English: A grammatical description. (Varieties of English Around the World G33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1-18.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2003. Sounds Cocos. In Solé, M.J., D. Recasens & J. Romero, eds. Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS2003). Barcelona: The 15th ICPhS Organizing Committee. 803-806.