Yihan Hao

Before coming to Stanford, Yihan earned her Bachelor of Art in Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Coming from the potato-farming industry, having grown up in China, then completed her studies in the US, she has developed a renewed curiosity about her mother tongue’s linguistic roots and morphologies. She wishes to rediscover a vital part of her identity, not just merely through her own perspective as a Chinese national, but also via a rigorous academic and research lens that pushes her to dive deeper into the social and cultural contexts that have transformed the language over the thousands of years of its evolution. Her future research assesses the cultural reasons behind the use of different linguistic status symbols by generation Z in mainland China.