The Research Management Center congratulates Prof. Wang Xiaomei, Head of Chinese Studies, on her recent publication entitled ‘The restructuring of a speech community on a foreign land: The Tianjiners in Sabah, Malaysia’ in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development on 14 October 2020.

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is one of the top SSCI journals focusing on sociology and social psychology of language, and language and cultural policy. The research, in collaboration with University of Malaya, investigates the linguistic evolution of the Tianjin speech community in Sabah over the past 100 years.  

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01434632.2020.1832100

This is Prof. Wang’s sixth SSCI paper as the first author in the field of sociolinguistics. Up till now, Prof. Wang has more than 70 publications in the areas of Chinese linguistics and sociolinguistics, including Scopus indexed papers, CSSCI journal papers, book chapters and books. She will also get her first book in Chinese published by the Commercial Press (China) by the end of this year, about the sociolinguistic studies in Malaysia.

XMUM’s Department of Chinese Studies has shown its strong research strength in the area of linguistics, with a few undergraduates who have attended international conferences and published papers in academic journals. The Department will further strengthen its research capacity and promote research by both its faculty members and students, striving for a leading position in Malaysia and beyond.

About Prof. Wang Xiaomei

Prof. Wang Xiaomei has been focusing her research on the linguistic situation of Malaysian Chinese communities, with both Malaysian Mandarin and sociolinguistic studies as her research interests.

In 2019, she organized the Forum on Studies of Malaysian Mandarin and promoted the papers from the Forum to be published as a special issue for Global Chinese. Several of her research papers have been admitted by top journals in China, including 《中国语文》(pronounced as “zhongguo yuwen”, which means “Studies of the Chinese Language”) and 《汉语学报》(pronounced as “hanyu xuebao”, which means “Chinese Linguistics”).

In addition, she has contributed to the editing and writing of various books and dictionaries, such as 《全球华语大辞典》(pronounced as “quanqiu huayu da cidian”, which means “A Dictionary on Global Chinese”) and 《全球华语语法》(pronounced as “quanqiu huayu yufa”, which means “The grammatical studies on Global Chinese”), and worked as a guest editor for a special issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language, discussing Malaysia’s multilingualism, in 2017. Prof. Wang is also a sub-PI of China National Social Science Grant (major project), now collecting language resources across Malaysia.