Independent expert profile

Samantha
Soon

Linguist, consultant and educator.

I am a Sydney-based Malaysian linguist, consultant and educator. I work across phonetics and phonology, multilingual language data, research and teaching. Growing up among contact languages shaped both my research questions and the practical care I bring to language work.

01 · Profile

A practice built on attentive listening.

My practice connects close linguistic analysis with usable outcomes. I support teams working with speech and multilingual data, researchers developing robust methods, and students learning to hear and describe language more precisely.

My doctoral research developed a sketch grammar of Kwényï, an Oceanic language of Far South New Caledonia, from a historical perspective. The work brought together fieldwork, grammatical description and comparative Oceanic evidence.

I grew up multilingual in Malaysia and now work from Sydney. Moving between languages has made register, context and variation central to how I understand both research and applied language work.

02 · Expertise

Areas of practice

Phonetics and phonology

Speech data, transcription, Praat workflows, acoustic analysis, tone, vowel length, stress and sound-system analysis.

Translation and localization QA

Chinese–English and English–Mandarin translation, editing, proofreading, localization review and multilingual QA.

Research support

Research design, literature-review planning, transcription and annotation workflows, qualitative analysis and documentation.

Multilingual language data and AI evaluation

Annotation guidance, translation adequacy, linguistic quality review, code-switching and language-specific error analysis.

Translation

Freelance translation, editing and proofreading since 2019.
“Assault on the Body.” Translator. Graceworks, Singapore, 2025.
“Good News for Bruised Reeds: Mental Health and the Gospel Community.” Proofreader and editor. Graceworks, Singapore, 2024.

03 · Research

Selected research

Research interests include tone, tone loss, vowel length, stress, prosody, contact-induced phonological change, language documentation and socio-phonetics.

2025 · Article

“Kwényï (Far South, New Caledonia) — Language Snapshot.”
Language Documentation and Description, 25(1). Read the article

2023 · PhD

“Kwényï: A Sketch Grammar from a Historical Perspective.”
Doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney. Read the dissertation

Accepted

“Monophthongisation in Shammari Arabic: Acoustic evidence for shared phonological behaviour of gutturals, emphatics, and coronal sonorants.”
With Badr Alshammari and Gwendolyn Hyslop. Accepted by Arabic Linguistics, forthcoming.

Under review

“Phonetic and Phonological Observations on Kwényï.”
Revised manuscript with Oceanic Linguistics.

In preparation

“Tonoexodus in Kwényï? Residual tone, low functional load, and contact ecology in New Caledonia.”

Earlier work includes loanword phonology in Penang Hokkien, Singapore English phonology and linguistic landscapes.

04 · Teaching

Teaching and workshops

Clear, practical teaching for students, researchers and teams working with language.

Speech and sound

Praat for Beginners
Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology

Academic and publication writing

Academic Writing for Linguistics
From Thesis Chapter to Journal Article

Documentation

Language Documentation Basics
Documenting Tone
Writing a Sketch Grammar

Language data

Multilingual Language Data for AI Evaluation
Translation, Register and Cross-Cultural Meaning

Taught at

Nanjing University of Science and Technology, since 2023.
University of Sydney, 2020–2026.
KDU University College, Penang, 2015–2016.

05 · Languages

Seven languages, one attentive ear.

English · Mandarin · Hokkien · Malay · Cantonese · French · Korean

Beyond linguistics

I am also a classically-trained pianist. My favourites are the impressionists, Debussy and Frank Bridge especially: music that repays close attention.

06 · Contact

Work with me

I welcome thoughtful enquiries about consulting, research support, teaching and workshops.

szemin.samantha@gmail.com

Download professional profile (PDF)