Quain (Tianrang Bu)

Student Photo
Cohort Year: 2019
Research Interests: Language and Music, Phonology, Tones, Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Chinese Linguistics

Quain (Tianrang Bu) is a fifth year Ph.D. student in linguistics. His research interests are: language and music, tonal phonology, historical phonology, and linguistic and sociolinguistic fieldwork. He is teaching a course on Language and Music in Fall 2023. For his dissertation, he is currently working on the linguistic aspects of traditional Chinese music, specifically Soutseu Bindae, a Wu-language musical storytelling artform. He also worked on several other Chinese languages, including his native Mandarin (Standard and Dalien dialect), heritage language Hakka, as well as Cantonese and Hokkien. He has done fieldwork on Fijian and P'urhépecha. He holds a B.A. degree from Oberlin College in Anthropology and Comparative Literature with a Linguistics concentration.