About Me

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, and in Spanish, my pronouns are él/lo. In case you’re interested, my full name can be pronounced in the following ways/languages:

Language	Romanization	IPA
English	Chun-Jan Young	[tʃʊn dʒæn jʌŋ]
TW Mandarin	Hanyu Pinyin: yáng chún rán Wade-Giles: yang2 ch’un2 jan2	[jaŋ˨˦ tʃʷən˨˦ ɹæn˨˦]
TW Hokkien/Tâi-gí	Tâi-lô: iûnn sûn jiân	[ĩ̯ũ˨˦ sun˧ ʐi̯ɛn˨˦]
Cantonese	Jyutping: joeng4 seon4 jin4	[jœŋ˨˩ sɵn˨˩ jin˨˩]

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, linguistic typology, and linguistic anthropology, and I hold broad interests in description and analysis across all levels of linguistic structure from articulatory phonetics to clausal syntax and discourse pragmatics, with an eye on how language use is culturally grounded and situated. As such, my dissertation brings together various perspectives and subfields into one place, examining the morphosyntactic and prosodic properties of stress and focus in o ciriciring no tao do pongso (also known as Yami or Tao), a Bashiic (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. My principal teachers were Trudy Kane and Marina Piccinini. 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, near-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.