Tan Ying Ying is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at the Nanyang Technological University. She is the first Singaporean to have received the prestigious Fung Global Fellowship from Princeton University.
Ying Ying works on issues pertaining to language use and perception in bilingual and multilingual communities within the frameworks of sociophonetics and sociolinguistics. Her initial research focused on the phonetic and prosodic features of Singapore English, inquiring into what these features can say about Singapore English as a legitimate variety of English that has some form of global status and recognition. Her concern with seeking legitimacy for languages in Singapore has also led her to examine policy and social issues that shape and affect language planning and policies in Singapore and internationally. For her work on language planning and policy, she is particularly interested in understanding and unveiling how the Singaporean state manages ethnolinguistic diversity and engineers multilingual individuals through language, education and media policies.