In this talk, Dr. Yu will present a collaborative research project examining large-scale variation and change in Cantonese in Hong Kong. Using crowdsourcing methodologies, the project collects speech data and survey responses from a broad participant base, alongside systematically designed metalinguistic judgment tasks. By integrating these data sources, the project aims to provide a comprehensive account of contemporary linguistic variation and the mechanisms underlying language change.

Dr. Alan Yu is Chancellor’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the UC Berkeley PhonLab. His research focuses on speech processing and production, and how they both shape and are shaped by the phonological systems of languages. He is also broadly interested in understanding how language variation arises and how sound change emerges over time. His work often focuses on Cantonese and Washo, an endangered language of Northern California and Nevada. He is the
author of A Natural History of Infixation (Oxford University Press) and has (co-)edited several volumes, including The Handbook of Phonological Theory (2nd edition, Wiley-Blackwell), Origins of Sound Change: Approaches to Phonologization (Oxford University Press), and The Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press). He also serves as co-General Editor of the journal Laboratory Phonology.

This event is sponsored by the Peter Rushton and Jacqueline Ku Endowed Memorial Fund for Chinese Languages and The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics.