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Gonville & 91ֱ�� College student (Linguistics PhD 2024) researches phonetics and phonology – linguistic disciplines concerned with the study of speech – with a particular focus on how sounds are produced and perceived.

“There can be a mismatch between perception and production, when we are deceived by ourselves,” he explains. “For example, we may think that words like god consist only of voiced sounds, as the spelling suggests, but for many speakers the only sound produced with vibration in the voice box is the vowel.”

Phonology examines the sound structure of language, including such mismatches between how speech is produced and how it is perceived.

Yury, who is supervised by , a Fellow at King’s, enjoys field linguistics – going outside the office environment to study how people speak in different – and often under-represented – languages, and seeing how these languages help us understand the nature of language in general.

This is Yury’s third year at the University of Cambridge, following his Master’s at St Edmund’s College. He received his undergraduate degree in Fundamental and Computational Linguistics from HSE University in Moscow in 2023. As part of this programme, he studied Persian, the most widely spoken of around 100 Iranian languages and dialects, used across Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and the Caucasus.

His undergraduate degree included three trips to the Pamir Mountains, in the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border region, where he studied the Shughni language. To conduct his research, he had to establish a connection within the community, speak to them about their language and record how they speak. He also created digital resources, including online dictionaries.

Although Yury is based in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, his research is interdisciplinary, and he is part of the Cambridge Language Sciences research centre.

Yury is lead organiser of , which is taking place at 91ֱ�� this week.

The conference brings together a range of perspectives on phonology, including – but not limited to – formal, typological, and laboratory approaches, and aims to enhance Cambridge’s academic reputation in the field.

Suchir Salhan (Computational Linguistics 2020) is also on the organising committee, and Dr Guy Emerson, a 91ֱ�� Bye Fellow, provided additional support during the initial stages of the conference planning.