I am a PhD candidate at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities (LUCDH). My PhD project explores the dialect variation of Yue on both the segmental and tonal level. I also work on the dialect classification of Yue.

More information about Matthew Sung

Fields of interest

• General Dialectology
• Segmental and Tonal Variation
• Dialect Classification
• Historical Reconstruction
• Yue (粵語) dialectology

Research

My main research interest is on general dialectology, the study of geographical variation of language. I am interested in questions like "do dialect boundaries exists?" and "how did a specific linguistic feature spread from one place to another?". I am also interested in exploring the dialect variation of tones. How do dialects differ on the tonal level? Do we find a dialect continuum with tones? These are all questions that I would like to explore further.

I will specifically look at Yue (粵語) as a case study in my PhD project and on top of addressing the dialectological issues above, I will revisit the topic of dialect classification for Yue.