The Yuen Ren Society is an independent scholarly group dedicated to the study of Chinese dialects, especially through field-work, and also to the study of Chinese historical linguistics and its relationship to dialectology. It was founded in 1990 at the University of Washington. The Society orgnanizes periodic meetings around the United States, and publishes articles and books documenting various Chinese dialects.

The Society takes its name from Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982), the first Chinese linguist to practice Western dialect field-methods seriously. The name Yuen Ren also means "primary responsibility", which the Society thinks should remind us that collecting data is the first duty of a linguist.

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