Distinguished Sociolinguist and Language Variation Scholar
Associated with :
The National University of SingaporeRebecca Lurie Starr serves as Associate Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore, where she has established herself as a leading expert in language variation and multilingual development. After completing her PhD in Linguistics with a designation in Cognitive Science from Stanford University in 2012 and serving as an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, she joined NUS in 2013. Her research spans multiple languages including English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean, with particular focus on language variation, change, and acquisition in multilingual contexts. Through projects like the Singapore Multilingual Corpus and Voices of Children in Singapore, she investigates sociolinguistic development among Singaporean and expatriate children. Her work extends to diverse areas including the sociophonetic construction of style, discourse in media, and heritage language preservation. As director of multiple research initiatives and mentor to numerous PhD and MA students, she continues to shape understanding of language variation while documenting Singapore's rich linguistic diversity.