Field Research Assistant—Austronesian Language Documentation

Nanyang Technological University Singapore; Singapore; On-site; SGD 45,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

The Linguistics and Multilingual Studies programme at the NTU School of Humanities invites applications for a full-time Research Assistant to support a grant-funded project on Austronesian family-internal contact morphosyntax, with focus on Singapore and Maritime Southeast Asia.

You will collect and analyse qualitative data, coordinate interviews, transcribe recordings, manage data securely, supervise student assistants, and help prepare outputs for archiving and dissemination.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics or related field.
• Proficiency in English and Malay or Indonesian (both written and spoken).
• Experience in linguistic annotation, transcription, analysis, or related language research and software (FLEx, ELAN) is an advantage.
• Familiarity with qualitative data collection and basic data management practices.
• Strong understanding of research ethics and/or prior community-oriented research experience is desirable.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively with meticulous attention to detail.

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 in archival standards.
• Support literature review tasks including establishing baseline grammatical descriptions for Malayo-Polynesian languages.
• Supervise junior student assistants.
• Support preparation of project reports or dissemination materials and outputs.

Skills

Interview coordination

Transcription

Data management

Literature review

Team supervision

Community engagement

Education

Bachelor's degree in Linguistics

Tools

FLEx

ELAN

Job description

The Linguistics and Multilingual Studies programme at the NTU School of Humanities invites applications for a full-time Research Assistant to support a grant-funded project on Austronesian family-internal contact morphosyntax, with focus on Singapore and Maritime Southeast Asia.

You will collect and analyse qualitative data, coordinate interviews, transcribe recordings, manage data securely, supervise student assistants, and help prepare outputs for archiving and dissemination.