DEALL offers undergraduate programs in the Chinese Language (Chinese Major and Chinese Minor), that is, standard (Mandarin) Chinese. And beginning in the 2013-2014 academic year, DEALL has been offering “Conversational Cantonese for Mandarin Speakers I” (Chinese 4301 in Spring Semester, with Professor Chan serving as faculty supervisor). In Spring 2021 and Spring 2022, it was taught as a Distance Learning (DL) course. It returned to in-person mode in Spring 2023 for students on the OSU campus, while it continues to be available online via Zoom through CourseShare — since Spring 2021 — to students at the University of Michigan and other Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions via Zoom. A new fund — the Cantonese Gamluhk Fund (Fund Number: 316950: https://www.giveto.osu.edu/makeagift/?fund=316950 — was created in April 2020 to support the offering of Cantonese language courses (and other related academic programs in the future if the fund continues to grow to become an endowment fund).

DEALL has very strong graduate programs not only in Chinese Literature and Chinese Language Pedagogy, but also especially in Chinese Linguistics, with its long, well-established M.A. and Ph.D. Programs in Chinese Linguistics. Current faculty in Chinese linguistics are Marjorie K.M. Chan and Zhiguo Xie. Past Chinese linguistics faculty members include Timothy Light, James H.-Y. Tai, and Robert Sanders.

DEALL was first established in 1962 as a division offering a B.A. in Chinese and Japanese. The early core faculty included linguists William S-Y. Wang, Charles Fillmore, Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh, and Eugene Ching, as well as those in literature, David Ch’en, Tien-yi Li, and Harold Wright. By 1967, DEALL had added an M.A. degree in Chinese, first in Chinese literature and soon in Chinese linguistics as well, given the linguistic strength of the faculty. A Ph.D. degree in Chinese literature and Chinese linguistics was then added in 1969, a year before DEALL officially became a department in 1970. For Japanese, an M.A. degree in literature and linguistics was added in 1971, and a corresponding Ph.D. degree added in 1989. Along the way, Chinese and Japanese language pedagogy programs were added, perhaps towards the end of the 1980s or in the early 1990s. For Korean, a B.A. degree was established in 2005, the same year that DEALL moved to Hagerty Hall, from its original home in Cunz Hall, provocatively nicknamed Kongzi-lou 孔子樓 during China’s Cultural Revolution and its anti-Confucian stance.

Over the years, DEALL linguists who also dealt with the Chinese language from a pedagogical perspective include Timothy Light and Eugene Ching. Other DEALL faculty members who have dealt more strictly with Chinese language pedagogy are Tao-chung “Ted” Yao and current faculty member Galal Walker. And beyond DEALL, OSU faculty with interest in Chinese linguistics included psycholinguist Ovid Jyh-Lang Tzeng in Psychology in the 1970s, as well as other OSU faculty members who know Chinese and whose research include Chinese: linguists Becky Huang (Teaching and Learning) and Wynne Wong (French and Italian), phoneticians Robert A. Fox (Speech & Hearing Sciences) and Mary E. Beckman (Linguistics, retired) and syntactician Carl Pollard (Linguistics, retired), and ethnomusicologist Udo Will (School of Music, retired), with interest in cognitive linguistics and musicology.

DEALL linguists have been very active over the decades in organizing various Chinese linguistics and East Asian linguistics events. In Autumn 2022, one important event had been our 5th Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Forum —  BEAL Forum 5 — which, as in the case of BEAL Forum 4, was held virtually via Zoom, hosted here at The Ohio State University, on Friday, 28 October 2022. For further information on that event, go the to BEAL Forum website.  Other Chinese linguistics activities can be gleaned from the Graduate Association of Chinese Linguistics (GACL) website and from the Buckeye East Asian Linguistics (BEAL) website, the latter housing two main activities: 1) BEAL Forum, and 2) BEAL Publications. Our most recent BEAL publication is BEAL-6, a Festschrift, presented in honor of James H-Y. Tai, Professor of Chinese Linguistics, who taught in the Department from 1986 until 1995, and in 2018, created the endowed fund, James H-Y. Tai Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Fund, (Fund number: 647101), which supports our East Asian linguistics activities. BEAL-6 celebrates Professor Tai’s 80^th birthday.

In 1989, under Professor James Tai’s leadership, DEALL inaugurated the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which was named the Northeast Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NECCL) for the first three years.  NACCL returned to The Ohio State University in 2018 for its 30th anniversary. The 30th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-30) was held on 9-11 March 2018. (Two pre-conference workshops on “Data Collection & Corpora” took place in the afternoon of 8 March 2018.)

Among the activities at Ohio State involving Chinese linguistics is the inauguration of the biennial series of Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL) by Professor Marjorie Chan (DEALL) and graduate student Tsz-Him Tsui (Linguistics). It was initially funded by a workshop grant from the Buckeye Language Network.

The 6th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-6) is the most recent WICL conference that we hosted. It was held virtually on 27-28 May 2022 here at The Ohio State University. The next conference, WICL-7, will be held at Brigham Young University in 2024. The very first of the WICL series — the 1st Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-1) — was held in spring 2012 at OSU. WICL-2 followed in spring 2014, and was held at University of Chicago. WICL-3 returned to The Ohio State in spring 2016.  WICL-4 was held at University of British Columbia in early summer 2018. The 5th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-5) returned to The Ohio State University in spring 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, WICL-5 was held virtually via the Zoom webinar platform, and was very likely the first Chinese linguistics conference to be held virtually, attracting scholars from multiple countries, including Europe and East Asia. WICL-5 was planned to be held in conjunction with the celebration of our department’s onsite celebration of DEALL 50th Anniversary in 2020. Although the anniversary celebration was ultimately cancelled due to the pandemic, the planned program book was prepared, and a Proceedings volume was later published in 2021.

In Spring 2023, Professor Chan was invited to serve as the host of The 27th International Conference on Yue Dialects (第二十七屆國際粵方言研討會). This conference series was initiated in 1987 in Hong Kong by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was originally held biennially and then annually in China and its two SARs, Hong Kong and Macau. The 2023 conference — its first overseas venture — will be held virtually via Zoom on the evenings of November 30 to December 2 at The Ohio State University. The schedule corresponds to the mornings of December 1-3 in East Asia.

Besides her role as a faculty member in DEALL, Professor Chan had, from December 2010 through December 2018, served as the Director of the Institute for Chinese Studies, part of the East Asian Studies Center, where a host of China-related activities are planned and organized throughout the academic year, including lecture series, annual graduate forums, conferences, symposia, etc., often with co-sponsorship from our graduate student organizations and other units across the campus. One such event, for example, was the one-day symposium that was co-organized with Melton Center for Jewish Studies, China and the Jews in the Modern Era, held on 19 April 2015, on-site at the Mershon Center and accessible online via simultaneous webinar. As ICS director, she had also organized the annual ICS Graduate Forum and other ICS events.

Note that this website is a successor to the original website on what was once the College of Humanities’ web server (March 1996 to April 2014). With a change in format, from HTML to WordPress, due to time constraints, the web pages created for the earlier server have not been reformatted and moved to this website.

Marjorie K.M. Chan
chanosu.edu
URL: u.osu.edu/chan.9/

Dept. of East Asian Languages and Literatures
398 Hagerty Hall
1775 College Road
College of Arts and Sciences
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210-1340
U.S.A.