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I am a PhD Candidate in Chinese Linguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL). My advisor is Professor Marjorie K.M. Chan (陳潔雯教授). My research interests primarily focus on Chinese dialectology, especially in standard Cantonese (spoken in Hong Kong and Guangzhou) and other nonstandard Cantonese varieties. My dissertation conducts a classification study on a nonstandard Cantonese variety (Siyi dialect), from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, by employing quantitative approaches, such as Levenshtein distance, cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling (MDS). Siyi 四邑, literally “four districts”, refers to the four districts of Taishan 台山, Kaiping 開平, Xinhui 新會 and Enping 恩平, located in the southwestern area of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, China, where most of the early Chinese immigrants in North America are originally from. I was born in Xinhui 新會, one of the four districts and spent my first 18 years there before going to college in Beijing. I am always proud of having a native proficiency in Siyi dialect, standard Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.

Starting from August 2016, I have been working as a visiting assistant professor in Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (MLL) at College of the Holy Cross. Before coming to Ohio State, I received my MPhil degree in Linguistics from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2010. My MPhil thesis is entitled “The Diminutive Tone Change in Siyi Dialects”. My advisor at HKUST is Professor Min Zhang (張敏教授). I received my BA degree in Chinese Linguistics from Peking University in China in 2008.

My research interests are:

  • Chinese dialectology (especially Cantonese)
  • Language classification, quantitative methods in linguistics (clustering analysis and multidimensional scaling)
  • Language contact, sociolinguistics and language attitude studies
  • Historical linguistics
  • Applied linguistics and second language acquisition