2023 Incoming Grad Series: Huy Phan

THE STORY

I grew up in Saigon, Vietnam. I graduated from Cypress Community College in 2019 with an A.A in English and recently graduated from California State University, Long Beach in 2022 with a B.A in Linguistics. In Fall 2023, I will be joining UCSB Linguistics department for a PhD in Linguistics.

I am a Vietnamese immigrant, first-generation college student who was born and raised in Saigon (Vietnam). Arriving in the States in 2016 with only a high school diploma and minimal English education, I was soon overwhelmed by the financial, cultural, and linguistic barriers, which would deny my attempts to find jobs, make friends, or simply enjoy my new life. Despite challenges and hardships that I have faced in the past seven years, I persevered and graduated from Cypress College with an A.A in English, from CSULB with a B.A in Linguistics, and was recently accepted to the PhD program in Linguistics at UCSB.

My success thus far would not have been possible without the support and guidance from mentors, teachers, and outreach programs. In particular, the McNair Scholars Program at CSULB has played an important role in shaping my identity as a researcher and an educator. Beside providing me with opportunities for professional development (e.g., conferences, workshops, research internship), the program's commitment towards broadening participation in higher education from underrepresented communities inspired my goal to become a mentor. I aim to utilize my immigrant background and educational experience to assist underrepresented students in navigating higher education and achieving academic excellence.

WHY UCSB

I chose UCSB because my research agenda aligns with UCSB Linguistics' focus on issues concerning sustainability for linguistics of the world and its functional, community-based approach towards linguistic research. I am most interested in learning more about the ethics and techniques of language documentation to improve my research on Tây - a minoritized, threatened, and undocumented variety of Vietnamese spoken in the Mekong Delta (Southern Vietnam). Moreover, I will be able to adopt a multidisciplinary approach towards my Tây research with the support of faculty experts from different linguistic subfields, ranging from phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, to sociolinguistics.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

As a Tây speaker and a linguist, I feel great urgency and responsibility towards maintaining the speech variety of my community. In addition to documentation works, I am most interested in exploring the sound system of Tây, which is the most salient feature that distinguishes Tây from other varieties of Vietnamese. In particular, I will be analyzing the acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual domains of Tây phonology. In order to provide a comprehensive understanding of Tây, I will analyze its phonology in the historical and societal context of Southern Vietnam to examine underlying causes (e.g., language contact, socioeconomic displacement) that motivated sound changes and created the current Tây variety of Vietnamese that we came to know.

In Summer 2022, I initiated this research trajectory through the McNair Scholars' Research Internship Program. Under the guidance of Dr. Michael Ahland, I conducted a fieldwork study to examine the sound system of Bến Tre (a sub-variety of the Tây variety spoken in the Bến Tre province of Southern Vietnam), which provided not only the first systematic analysis on Tây phonology but also important pilot data and directions for my upcoming Tây research at UCSB.

FUN FACTS

I am very passionate about kendo (a form of Japanese sword fencing) and have been practicing it for several years now. Not only does it train my discipline and physical strength, but it is also a super effective way to improve my mental health. Nothing de-stresses me faster than being able to go all out and yell at the top of my lungs every practice. I like to play musical instruments in my free time. Other than piano, I am currently learning how to play the traditional Vietnamese musical instrument of sáo trúc ('bamboo flute'). My next biggest hobby would be video gaming (rogue-like, crpg).