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

Publications

Publications

  • Forthcoming. Between Niger-Congo and Macro-Sudan Belt: Diedrich Westermann’s legacy in West-Central African Language History (Niger-Congo Comparative Studies). Berlin: Language Science Press. eds. with Tom Güldemann
  • Forthcoming. Plural words and plural affixes in the Macro-Sudan Belt. In Tom Güldemann & Jakob Lesage (eds.), Between Niger-Congo and Macro-Sudan Belt: Diedrich Westermann’s legacy in West-Central African Language History (Niger-Congo Comparative Studies). Berlin: Language Science Press.
  • Forthcoming. Negation in Kam, a Niger-Congo language of central-east Nigeria. In Veselinova, Ljuba & Miestamo, Matti (eds.), Negation in the languages of the world. Berlin: Language Science Press.
  • Forthcoming. Rooting for Kam in Niger-Congo.
  • 2024. Documentation of Kam: Natural interaction, multimodality, and community-driven ethnographic documentation. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0012-70DE-C
  • 2023. Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances 9(16). eadg6175. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adg6175. With Skirgård, Hedvig, Hannah J. Haynie, Damián E. Blasi, Harald Hammarström, Jeremy Collins, Jay J. Latarche, et al. 
  • 2023. Binominal compounds and other binominal constructions in Pama-Nyungan languages. In Pepper, Steve & Masini, Francesca (eds.), Binominal lexemes in cross-linguistic perspective (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
  • 2022. Overlooked Data in Typological Databases: What Grambank Teaches Us About Gaps in Grammars. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), Marseille, 20-25 June 2022, 2884–2890. Marseille. With Hannah J. Haynie, Hedvig Skirgård, Tobias Weber & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
  • 2021. Kam dictionary. Version 1.0. Android 4.0 and up. URL: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jlesg.kdx.lexicon.
  • 2020. A grammar and lexicon of Kam (àŋwɔ̀m), a Niger-Congo language of central eastern Nigeria. Paris: INALCO. (PhD Thesis.)
  • 2019. Selected Kam texts and elicitation sessions (with audio). Pangloss Collection: An archive for endangered languages. (https://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/corpus/list_rsc.php?lg=Kam&name=kam)
  • 2018. Review: Littig, Sabine: Linguistische Beschreibung des Kolbila. Eine Adamawasprache der Nordregion Kameruns. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe 2016. XV, 227 pp., 8° = Grammatische Analysen Afrikanischer Sprachen/Grammatical Analyses of African Languages 53. € 44.80. ISBN 978-3-89645-569-7. Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 113(4–5). 416–419.

MA and BA Theses

  • 2016. Words, trees, and the dispersal of iron working in sub-Saharan Africa: Some explorations of a computational linguistic approach to tracing the spread of words for ‘iron’ across Africa. Nijmegen: Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. (Master’s Thesis.)
  • 2014. Nominal compounds and other N-N combinations: A typological study of a sample of Pama-Nyungan languages. Leuven: University of Leuven. (Master’s Thesis.)
  • 2013. Surprise and modality, negation and subjectification: Mirative functions of no way. Leuven: University of Leuven. (Bachelor’s thesis.)

Self-published open resources

Media coverage and blog posts

2022 ELDP Project Highlight: Remote documentation training for speakers of Kam (Nyingwom), a language of Taraba State, Nigeria. (https://elararchive.org/blog/2022/05/12/eldp-project-highlight-remote-documentation-training-for-speakers-of-kam-nyingwom-a-language-of-taraba-state-nigeria/).
2019-2022 Contributor to the Adamawanist Instagram channel, which tries to generate interest for languages spoken in north- and central-eastern Nigeria (https://www.instagram.com/adamawanist/?hl=en).
2019 The Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris published a mini documentary featuring the AdaGram team (https://leblob.fr/societe/urgence-linguistique-la-technologie-la-rescousse).
2018 Taraba TV (a Nigerian television network operating mainly in Taraba State) aired a thirty-minute interview about describing Kam and the importance of language description and documentation.