CJ Young

PhD Candidate in Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara

My name is Chun-Jan Young (楊淳然), but I go by CJ in almost all situations. In English, my pronouns are he/him/his. In case you’re interested, my full name can be pronounced in the following ways/languages:

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and therefore I live and work on the traditional, stolen, and unceded lands of the Barbareño Chumash people. I work in the fields of language documentation and linguistic typology, and I hold broad interests in description and analysis across all levels of linguistic structure from articulatory phonetics to clausal syntax and discourse pragmatics. However, I am pursuing my current obsession with prosody, and my dissertation project is a comprehensive study of stress and prosodic prominence in o ciriciring no tao do pongso (also known as Yami or Tao), a Batanic (Austronesian) language spoken by the indigenous Tao people (達悟族) of Orchid Island (蘭嶼), Taiwan. I received my MA in Linguistics in 2019 from National Taiwan University (臺大).

Prior to entering linguistics and academia, I was a flutist and pursued classical music professionally. I hold a Bachelor of Music (BM) and Artist Diploma (AD) from the University of Miami Frost School of Music, and a Master of Music (MM) from the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University. As such, I am also interested in the intersections of language and music. I served my mandatory Taiwanese national service at the famous Timur Elementary School (地磨兒國小) in beautiful Pingtung County in Southern Taiwan, where I was first introduced to the Indigenous communities and cultures of Taiwan.

I was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and grew up in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai before attending university in the USA. Due to the unique circumstances of my upbringing, I speak English as my default language and Mandarin Chinese at a high (though not entirely native) level. I also speak Japanese, Spanish, German, and Dutch to constantly shifting degrees of intermediate proficiency, and have life goals to become proficient in Cantonese, Taiwanese Hokkien, Korean, and Tagalog.

I have a twin brother who is currently Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Outside of academia, I am a massive coffee geek and a lover of cats, metro systems, and noodles.