John Victor Singler
Expertise:
-
Sociolinguistics - African Linguistics - Creolistics - LADO
Practitioner
Qualifications:
-
A.B. History (Dartmouth)
-
MA African Area Studies (SOAS)
-
MA, PhD Linguistics (UCLA)
John Victor Singler is a
professor of linguistics at New York
University. In addition to teaching at NYU in New York and also at its
academic centre in Accra, Ghana, he has been a visiting scholar at Stanford
University and the Universities of Qubec Montral, Liberia, Ghana, and Cape
Town.
Prof. Singler has a long association with Liberia. He taught English in
Liberian secondary schools from 1969 to 1975. Liberia subsequently became the
focus of his research career, and he has carried out research there with grants
from the NSF, NEH, Fulbright Senior Research Scholars Program, New York
University, and Michigan State University.
His areas of expertise include pidgin and creole studies, sociolinguistics,
and phonology. In addition to pidgin and creole languages, he has also published
on American English and on languages in the Kru and Mande branches of
Niger-Congo. He edited
Pidgin
and Creole Tense-Mood-Aspect Systems (John Benjamins) and, with Silvia
Kouwenberg,
The
Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies (Wiley-Blackwell). With Gareth
Griffiths he produced an annotated edition of Joseph Jeffrey Walters's 1891
novel, Guanya Pau: A Story of an African Princess, the first novel in
English by an African to be published in book form.
He is one of the founders and organizers of the
African Linguistics School (ALS), a
two-week institute for graduate students in linguistics at African universities.
The ALS is biennial; it was held in 2009 in Accra, and is scheduled to be held
in 2011 in Porto-Novo, Bnin.
Prof. Singler has worked as a LADO researcher and linguistic analyst. He was
a founding member of the Language & National Origin Group who authored the 2004
Guidelines. With
Peter L. Patrick, he authored and proposed a
Resolution endorsing the
Guidelines on the use of Language Analysis for Determination of Origin,
which was passed in January 2009 by the Linguistic Society of America.
Email:
john.singler Please
add: @nyu.edu
Related Publications:
2008. (with Silvia Kouwenberg.)
The
Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
2006. Positioning Vernacular Liberian English relative to West Africa's other
Pidgin Englishes. In Francis Ebgokhare & Clement Kolawole (eds.),
Globalization and the future of African languages, 139-161. Ibadan: Ibadan
Cultural Studies Group.
2004. The linguistic asylum interview and the linguists evaluation of it,
with special reference to Liberian political asylum applicants in Switzerland.
International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 11: 222-239.
- The article addresses Swiss LADO practice--in which both an
individual's language use and cultural knowledge are
evaluated--from the perspective of sociolinguistics.
2004. Liberian Settler English - phonology. In A Handbook of Varieties of
English. Vol. 1: Phonology, ed. Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W Schneider, Clive
Upton, Rajend Mesthrie & Kate Burridge. (Topics in English Linguistics, ed.
Bernd Kortmann & Elizabeth Closs Traugott.) Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter,
65-75.
2004. The morphology and syntax of Liberian Settler English. In A
Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol 2: Morphology and Syntax, ed. Bernd
Kortmann, Edgar W Schneider, Clive Upton, Rajend Mesthrie & Kate Burridge.
(Topics in English Linguistics, ed. Bernd Kortmann & Elizabeth Closs Traugott.)
Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 879-897.
2004. (coauthor) Guidelines for the use of language analysis in relation to
questions of national origin in refugee cases. The International Journal of
Speech, Language and the Law: Forensic Linguistics, 11(2): 261-266.
Available at
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/
1990.
Pidgin
and Creole Tense-Mood-Aspect Systems. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.