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Dr Chin’s research interests lie in language and linguistics, with a particular focus on the Chinese language and its dialects. Dr Chin has long been fascinated by the relationships between language, society, cognition and culture, as well as the development of language across time and space. In 2011, Dr Chin secured support from the General Research Fund for a three-year project addressing the interaction between local languages and Putonghua in multilingual and multi- ethnic Hainan province as a consequence of urbanisation. That project has been commended for its promising and innovative methodology, which captures some salient on-going sociolinguistic issues through a combination of fieldwork, a questionnaire survey and linguistic analysis. This represents an unusually significant contribution for a young scholar who has just started his research career. Another example of Dr Chin’s innovative linguistic research is the online language database he developed in 2012. The database provides transcriptions of Cantonese movies produced between the 1950s and 1970s. This is the first attempt to convert otherwise unnoticed authentic and natural language samples into organized research resources for rigorous analysis of the development of Cantonese over the past 60 years. Since joining the Institute in May 2010, Dr Chin has published six papers in high-ranking journals, and has contributed four chapters to volumes edited by internationally renowned scholars. He has also been invited to take part in media interviews on the emergence and development of new Chinese words, which are among his many key research areas. Dr Chin also contributes to collegial research initiatives at the Institute. He gives guest lectures on linguistics to MEd, EdD and research degree students, as well as organises major international conferences and participates in team research in his department. | 
