Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

Research Portfolio

 

Since September 2019 I have been working as a post-doc and project coordinator for Prof. Claudia Derichs in Transregional Southeast Asian Studies.


I studied linguistics and African studies with a focus on Bantu languages at the universities of Leipzig and Leiden. I made my first experiences in conducting field work in the Mount Meru region of Tanzania when I worked on my master thesis, a sketch grammar of Rwa. I did my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology Leipzig and the Humboldt University Berlin working on a Khoisan language from Botswana. My dissertation “Phonetic and phonological description of the N!aqriaxe variety of ǂ'Amkoe and the impact of language contact“ (Harrassowitz, 2016) is not only a phonetic/phonological documentation of the language but also deals with the historic and present language contact scenarios in the southern Kalahari desert.

Apart from the coordination of an application with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research at the IAAW I am currently working on an analysis of phonetic/phonological differences between different N!aqriaxe varieties. I also focus on investigating phonetic/phonological areality in southern Africa*. Furthermore, I am interested in the transmission of culture specific knowledge in Khoisan populations and in cultural identity. Here, I am especially curious about the role that language plays as a means of transmission on the one hand but also as a marker of identity.


*We are talking about a “linguistic area” if languages within a geographically defined region share a set of features not because the languages are related to each other but because of contact.

 

Research areas:

  • Khoisan langauges
  • phonetics and phonology
  • language contact and language areas
  • language as a factor of cultural transfer of knowledge and identity