Jakob R E Leimgruber
Biographic Data
| ID | 131818 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jakob R E Leimgruber |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jakob R E |
| FAMILY NAME | Leimgruber |
| SIGNATURE | LEIMGRUBER J R E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Freiburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6408-6873 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
“Only fools don’t change their mind(s)”
The present study investigates plural non-verbal concord — the variation between the distributive plural (e.g., change their minds ) and the distributive singular (e.g., change their mind ) forms following a plural subject — in two inner circle varieties, British and American English, and two newer Englishes, Nigerian and Singapore English. We focus on usage patterns for six high-frequency, potentially variable constructions ( change one’s life ,…
Clause-Final Adverbs in Colloquial Singapore English Revisited
Many scholars consider clause-final adverbs (CFAs) like already, also, and only to be a prominent feature of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), but little is known about their use in present-day CSE. Using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), we investigate patterns of variation involving CFAs and examine whether they are sensitive to factors such as speaker age and gender. We find that clause-final already and only has in…
Adverbial confirm in colloquial Singapore English
Despite its innovative, salient, and robust usage in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), the adverbial use of confirm has largely gone unnoticed. In this paper, we provide morphosyntactic and semantic evidence to show that adverbial confirm behaves like a strongly subjective speaker-oriented adverb (SpOA). We argue that adverbial confirm developed as a result of contact with the Mandarin adverbial kending, likely due to English–Mandarin bilingual…
Sociolinguistic variation in Colloquial Singapore English sia
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), also known as ‘Singlish’, features a wide range of sentence‐final particles (SFP) influenced by local languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. This study focuses on the SFP sia , a relatively new and less‐explored particle with Malay roots. We examine sia and its variants ( sia, sial , siak and siol ) using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages, a 6.9‐million‐word text‐message corp…
Is it in Colloquial Singapore English
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of worl…
English in Taiwan
While World Englishes scholarship has always been concerned with different types of English varieties, Expanding Circle (i.e., non-postcolonial) Englishes have had a ‘late start’ in being added to its research remit. As a result, much important work in this area remains to be done. Expanding Circle Englishes in general and Asian Expanding Circle Englishes in particular are still neglected in many handbooks of World Englishes (e.g., in The Cambrid…
The Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM)
This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organiz…
Managing and Investing in Hybrid Identities in the Globalized United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates have long been in contact with English. Its economy requires high rates of migration, resulting in large numbers of migrants who impact the local linguistic ecology. English acts as lingua franca and occurs in several forms, as labour is recruited from nations having experienced British or American influences. Arabic is used at home by Emiratis and Arab expatriates. However, it faces pressure from English both in educatio…
Ethnic and gender variation in the use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles
Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors a…
Language attitudes and identity building in the linguistic landscape of Montreal
Few studies to date have considered the agency of readers in reinterpreting the cultural, historical, political, and social background of the linguistic landscape (LL; visible language in public space) and the ways in which individual and collective identities are discursively conceptualised through the LL. In this article, we present results from a study involving participants from three self-described sociolinguistic identities (Francophone, An…
Multilingual Global Cities
The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the sociolinguistic research which has been and is currently being conducted in Dubai, and has been published in the English language. After providing a discussion of the mosaic of Dubai’s population, an attempt will be made to tap into the different and diverse areas of sociolinguistic research, while new directions for future research will be discussed as well. The three most important emergi…
Global multilingualism, local bilingualism, official monolingualism
This paper documents the linguistic landscape of Saint Catherine Street, a major thoroughfare in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The street is taken as a microcosm of the sociolinguistic variation observable at the various levels of analysis, ranging from the neighbourhood, the city, the province, Canada as a whole, and the globally similar environment of the downtown shopping street. By way of a systematic sampling of signs in the street's linguistic …
Multilingualism and the role of English in the United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has witnessed an unprecedented economic and cultural development since its foundation in 1971. Foreign labor and investment play a central role in this development, yielding a sharp imbalance between the Emirati and the foreign population. A population of no less than 85 per cent of highly transient foreigners strongly impacts the local linguistic landscape, with many languages competing in the public sphere. Englis…
Itineracy immobilised
A famous element in Singapore’s food culture is the hawker centre, consisting of a large collection of individually-run stalls selling various kinds of foods and drinks. These centres, which dot the island and its public housing estates, were built on government initiative beginning in the 1970s, with the prime objective of sedentarising the large number of erstwhile itinerant street hawkers, based on a discourse of promoting ‘cleanliness’ inhere…
Singaporean internet chit chat compared to informal spoken language
This paper compares data from a Singaporean chit chat forum to informal spoken data. We first perform a qualitative analysis of text samples in a framework of indexicality. Then we present quantitative findings for two (sets of) features each of the contact variety Singlish (particles, the kena- passive) and spoken English in general (discourse markers, contractions). For the former some similarities are observed but we also find that the forum c…
Singaporean students' language repertoires and attitudes revisited
Singapore has received a large amount of scholarly interest with regards to the structural and sociolinguistic properties of its local variety of English. In contrast, there is comparatively less empirical data on individual linguistic repertoires and usage patterns. Building on previous research into the linguistic and sociological background of young Singaporean adults, our study examines 450 students recruited from three distinct educational i…
Using eye tracking to investigate what bilinguals notice about linguistic landscape images
In daily life, we experience dynamic visual input referred to as the “linguistic landscape” (LL), comprised of images and text, for example, signs, and billboards ( Gorter, 2013 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni 2010). While much is known about LLs descriptively, less is known about what people notice when viewing LLs. Building upon the bilingual eye movement reading literature (e.g., Whitford, Pivneva, & Titone, 2016 ) and…
Bahin Singapore English
Colloquial Singapore English ('Singlish') is well known, among other features, for its class of discourse particles derived from substrate languages. These particles have been ascribed to various languages, chief among them Southern Min, Malay, and Cantonese. Previous research has also shown this class to be open to newcomers, with Lim (2007) concentrating on particles of Cantonese origin appearing in the 1980s. In this paper, I present evidence …
Singlish as defined by young educated Chinese Singaporeans
Colloquial Singapore English, or Singlish, exists in an environment characterised by strong language planning aimed at demoting it in favour of Standard English, as well as in a linguistic ecology featuring a number of languages that have had an impact on its current form. An actual definition of Singlish, beyond scholarly linguistic analyses, is less than straightforward, and this article sets out to address this. Chinese Singaporeans were asked…
The trouble with World Englishes
Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their …
Singapore English
Existing models of variation for Singapore English, with the possible exception of Alsagoff's cultural orientation model, are largely unsatisfactory in accounting for the high degree of Singlish–Standard alternation found in everyday speech. The occurrence, for instance, of Singlish elements in otherwise Standard speech is a challenge. An approach based on indexicality enables a less code‐based, more inclusive analysis, allowing for a multitude o…
Teaching and Learning Guide for
This guide accompanies the following article : Jakob R. E. Leimgruber, ‘Singapore English’, Language and Linguistics Compass 5/1 (2011): 47–62. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749‐818x.2010.00262.x Author’s Introduction This article describes the English(es) spoken in Singapore in four major parts. The first three (Phonology, Grammar, Vocabulary) are a linguistic description, based on previous literature on the topic and on recent findings. While by necessity se…
Singapore English
Singapore English is a nativised variety of English, which comes in essentially two forms: Standard Singapore English and Colloquial Singapore English. This article describes the sound system and the grammar of this variety, including an overview of the local vocabulary. A concluding section explains the various models that have been proposed to explain that variation in Singapore English, including the post‐creole continuum () and diglossia (), …
Bahin Singapore English
Colloquial Singapore English ('Singlish') is well known, among other features, for its class of discourse particles derived from substrate languages. These particles have been ascribed to various languages, chief among them Southern Min, Malay, and Cantonese. Previous research has also shown this class to be open to newcomers, with Lim (2007) concentrating on particles of Cantonese origin appearing in the 1980s. In this paper, I present evidence …
Singaporean students' language repertoires and attitudes revisited
Singapore has received a large amount of scholarly interest with regards to the structural and sociolinguistic properties of its local variety of English. In contrast, there is comparatively less empirical data on individual linguistic repertoires and usage patterns. Building on previous research into the linguistic and sociological background of young Singaporean adults, our study examines 450 students recruited from three distinct educational i…
Singapore English
Singapore English is a nativised variety of English, which comes in essentially two forms: Standard Singapore English and Colloquial Singapore English. This article describes the sound system and the grammar of this variety, including an overview of the local vocabulary. A concluding section explains the various models that have been proposed to explain that variation in Singapore English, including the post‐creole continuum () and diglossia (), …
Singapore English
Existing models of variation for Singapore English, with the possible exception of Alsagoff's cultural orientation model, are largely unsatisfactory in accounting for the high degree of Singlish–Standard alternation found in everyday speech. The occurrence, for instance, of Singlish elements in otherwise Standard speech is a challenge. An approach based on indexicality enables a less code‐based, more inclusive analysis, allowing for a multitude o…
Singlish as defined by young educated Chinese Singaporeans
Colloquial Singapore English, or Singlish, exists in an environment characterised by strong language planning aimed at demoting it in favour of Standard English, as well as in a linguistic ecology featuring a number of languages that have had an impact on its current form. An actual definition of Singlish, beyond scholarly linguistic analyses, is less than straightforward, and this article sets out to address this. Chinese Singaporeans were asked…
Managing and Investing in Hybrid Identities in the Globalized United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates have long been in contact with English. Its economy requires high rates of migration, resulting in large numbers of migrants who impact the local linguistic ecology. English acts as lingua franca and occurs in several forms, as labour is recruited from nations having experienced British or American influences. Arabic is used at home by Emiratis and Arab expatriates. However, it faces pressure from English both in educatio…
Teaching and Learning Guide for
This guide accompanies the following article : Jakob R. E. Leimgruber, ‘Singapore English’, Language and Linguistics Compass 5/1 (2011): 47–62. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749‐818x.2010.00262.x Author’s Introduction This article describes the English(es) spoken in Singapore in four major parts. The first three (Phonology, Grammar, Vocabulary) are a linguistic description, based on previous literature on the topic and on recent findings. While by necessity se…
Singapore English
Singapore English is a nativised variety of English, which comes in essentially two forms: Standard Singapore English and Colloquial Singapore English. This article describes the sound system and the grammar of this variety, including an overview of the local vocabulary. A concluding section explains the various models that have been proposed to explain that variation in Singapore English, including the post‐creole continuum () and diglossia (), …
Singapore English
Existing models of variation for Singapore English, with the possible exception of Alsagoff's cultural orientation model, are largely unsatisfactory in accounting for the high degree of Singlish–Standard alternation found in everyday speech. The occurrence, for instance, of Singlish elements in otherwise Standard speech is a challenge. An approach based on indexicality enables a less code‐based, more inclusive analysis, allowing for a multitude o…
The trouble with World Englishes
Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their …
Singlish as defined by young educated Chinese Singaporeans
Colloquial Singapore English, or Singlish, exists in an environment characterised by strong language planning aimed at demoting it in favour of Standard English, as well as in a linguistic ecology featuring a number of languages that have had an impact on its current form. An actual definition of Singlish, beyond scholarly linguistic analyses, is less than straightforward, and this article sets out to address this. Chinese Singaporeans were asked…
Bahin Singapore English
Colloquial Singapore English ('Singlish') is well known, among other features, for its class of discourse particles derived from substrate languages. These particles have been ascribed to various languages, chief among them Southern Min, Malay, and Cantonese. Previous research has also shown this class to be open to newcomers, with Lim (2007) concentrating on particles of Cantonese origin appearing in the 1980s. In this paper, I present evidence …
Using eye tracking to investigate what bilinguals notice about linguistic landscape images
In daily life, we experience dynamic visual input referred to as the “linguistic landscape” (LL), comprised of images and text, for example, signs, and billboards ( Gorter, 2013 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni 2010). While much is known about LLs descriptively, less is known about what people notice when viewing LLs. Building upon the bilingual eye movement reading literature (e.g., Whitford, Pivneva, & Titone, 2016 ) and…
Itineracy immobilised
A famous element in Singapore’s food culture is the hawker centre, consisting of a large collection of individually-run stalls selling various kinds of foods and drinks. These centres, which dot the island and its public housing estates, were built on government initiative beginning in the 1970s, with the prime objective of sedentarising the large number of erstwhile itinerant street hawkers, based on a discourse of promoting ‘cleanliness’ inhere…
Singaporean internet chit chat compared to informal spoken language
This paper compares data from a Singaporean chit chat forum to informal spoken data. We first perform a qualitative analysis of text samples in a framework of indexicality. Then we present quantitative findings for two (sets of) features each of the contact variety Singlish (particles, the kena- passive) and spoken English in general (discourse markers, contractions). For the former some similarities are observed but we also find that the forum c…
Singaporean students' language repertoires and attitudes revisited
Singapore has received a large amount of scholarly interest with regards to the structural and sociolinguistic properties of its local variety of English. In contrast, there is comparatively less empirical data on individual linguistic repertoires and usage patterns. Building on previous research into the linguistic and sociological background of young Singaporean adults, our study examines 450 students recruited from three distinct educational i…
Multilingual Global Cities
The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the sociolinguistic research which has been and is currently being conducted in Dubai, and has been published in the English language. After providing a discussion of the mosaic of Dubai’s population, an attempt will be made to tap into the different and diverse areas of sociolinguistic research, while new directions for future research will be discussed as well. The three most important emergi…
Global multilingualism, local bilingualism, official monolingualism
This paper documents the linguistic landscape of Saint Catherine Street, a major thoroughfare in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The street is taken as a microcosm of the sociolinguistic variation observable at the various levels of analysis, ranging from the neighbourhood, the city, the province, Canada as a whole, and the globally similar environment of the downtown shopping street. By way of a systematic sampling of signs in the street's linguistic …
Multilingualism and the role of English in the United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has witnessed an unprecedented economic and cultural development since its foundation in 1971. Foreign labor and investment play a central role in this development, yielding a sharp imbalance between the Emirati and the foreign population. A population of no less than 85 per cent of highly transient foreigners strongly impacts the local linguistic landscape, with many languages competing in the public sphere. Englis…
Ethnic and gender variation in the use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles
Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors a…
Language attitudes and identity building in the linguistic landscape of Montreal
Few studies to date have considered the agency of readers in reinterpreting the cultural, historical, political, and social background of the linguistic landscape (LL; visible language in public space) and the ways in which individual and collective identities are discursively conceptualised through the LL. In this article, we present results from a study involving participants from three self-described sociolinguistic identities (Francophone, An…
Managing and Investing in Hybrid Identities in the Globalized United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates have long been in contact with English. Its economy requires high rates of migration, resulting in large numbers of migrants who impact the local linguistic ecology. English acts as lingua franca and occurs in several forms, as labour is recruited from nations having experienced British or American influences. Arabic is used at home by Emiratis and Arab expatriates. However, it faces pressure from English both in educatio…
Is it in Colloquial Singapore English
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of worl…
English in Taiwan
While World Englishes scholarship has always been concerned with different types of English varieties, Expanding Circle (i.e., non-postcolonial) Englishes have had a ‘late start’ in being added to its research remit. As a result, much important work in this area remains to be done. Expanding Circle Englishes in general and Asian Expanding Circle Englishes in particular are still neglected in many handbooks of World Englishes (e.g., in The Cambrid…
The Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM)
This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organiz…
Clause-Final Adverbs in Colloquial Singapore English Revisited
Many scholars consider clause-final adverbs (CFAs) like already, also, and only to be a prominent feature of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), but little is known about their use in present-day CSE. Using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), we investigate patterns of variation involving CFAs and examine whether they are sensitive to factors such as speaker age and gender. We find that clause-final already and only has in…
Adverbial confirm in colloquial Singapore English
Despite its innovative, salient, and robust usage in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), the adverbial use of confirm has largely gone unnoticed. In this paper, we provide morphosyntactic and semantic evidence to show that adverbial confirm behaves like a strongly subjective speaker-oriented adverb (SpOA). We argue that adverbial confirm developed as a result of contact with the Mandarin adverbial kending, likely due to English–Mandarin bilingual…
Sociolinguistic variation in Colloquial Singapore English sia
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), also known as ‘Singlish’, features a wide range of sentence‐final particles (SFP) influenced by local languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. This study focuses on the SFP sia , a relatively new and less‐explored particle with Malay roots. We examine sia and its variants ( sia, sial , siak and siol ) using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages, a 6.9‐million‐word text‐message corp…
“Only fools don’t change their mind(s)”
The present study investigates plural non-verbal concord — the variation between the distributive plural (e.g., change their minds ) and the distributive singular (e.g., change their mind ) forms following a plural subject — in two inner circle varieties, British and American English, and two newer Englishes, Nigerian and Singapore English. We focus on usage patterns for six high-frequency, potentially variable constructions ( change one’s life ,…
Linguistics (21 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (11 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works) · Indexicality (5 works)