Nala Lee

Nala Lee is an associate professor of linguistics at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the extreme consequences of language change brought about by language contact, including the birth of contact languages as well as the endangerment and demise of languages, and the perspectives she takes on these issues are both sociolinguistic and structural in nature. More generally, she is interested in how language vitality is measured, and is a co-developer of the Language Endangerment Index which is used on the Endangered Languages Project portal (www.endangeredlanguages.com). Locally in Singapore, she works with the Chinese Peranakans on documenting and describing their language, Baba Malay. 

A view of Baba Malay’ endangerment through the lens of multilingualism and its loss

Baba Malay is a contact language that emerged through early intermarriages between indigenous women in the Malay Peninsula and Chinese traders in the region. Spoken by the descendants of these multicultural intermarriages, Baba Malay has become critically endangered. Early Baba Malay data from books published in the late 1800s and early 1900s is compared with modern Baba Malay data collected through language documentation. It becomes clear through such a comparison that the structural and lexical changes in the endangered language can be better contextualised within the loss of multilingualism and to some extent, multiculturalism on the part of its speakers.