Welcome!

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). And beginning in Spring 2021, when it was taught as a Distance Learning (DL) course, it has been available through CourseShare to students at the University of Michigan and other Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions. 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. 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 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.)

DEALL linguists have been very active over the decades in organizing various Chinese linguistics and East Asian linguistics events. In Spring 2021, one important event has been our 4th Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Forum —  BEAL Forum 4 — which was held virtually via Zoom, hosted here at The Ohio State University, on Friday, 5 March 2021. 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.

In 2017-2018 academic year, the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL) returned to The Ohio State University for the 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).  The upcoming WICL conference is the 6th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-6), to be held virtually on 27-28 May 2022 at The Ohio State University.

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 DEALL 50th Anniversary. Although the anniversary celebration was ultimately cancelled, the planned program book was prepared, and a Proceedings volume is scheduled be published in 2021.

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 the Humanities 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 new site.

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.