Satoshi Nambu joined Monash in 2017. He was awarded a Research Fellowship for Young Scientists by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2015–2017) and served as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). Satoshi has been working closely with NINJAL as a research project member of their two projects (Corpus and Multilingual projects). He was awarded a Japan Foundation Research Grant in 2020.

As of 2025, Satoshi serves as Chair of the School Equity, Diversity, Inclusion Committee, after serving as a Faculty committee member, and a coordinator of the Japanese Studies major. Satoshi also serves as a Secretary and Executive Committee member of Japanese Studies Association of Australia (2019-), and an Editorial Board Member of the journal 'The Japanese Journal of Language in Society' (2023-). 

My research interests lie in the dynamics of language variation: how it contributes to diachronic change in grammar, and how it functions as a means to reflect and construct the identity and ideology of a speaker.

Much of my work has focused on syntactic variation with respect to  i)  whether it reflects an ongoing linguistic change in grammar, and  ii) the extent to which linguistic and other factors influence its perception and use and the extent to which they may have contributed to propelling the observed linguistic change. I have employed quantitative approaches, including corpus-based and questionnaire surveys and psycholinguistic experiments. 

Besides the above projects, recently, I have been engaged in sociolinguistic projects on 1) linguistic landscape to identify the functions of language on signage in relation to immigrants' identities and ideologies in Japan, and on 2) character language ("role language") used in fiction and translation to understand the mechanism of how such speech styles and their social meanings have been developed in relation to real-life language ideologies, viewing it as a case of language variation with reference to the sociolinguistic concept "enregisterment".

The latest publication list :  here  (my personal website)

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