Pichi is a variety of African Caribbean English Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. Closely related to Krio (Sierra Leone) and West African Pidgin, and historically linked to Caribbean varieties, Pichi has developed a distinct character through contact with Spanish and the Bantu language Bube. This project has produced descriptive and sociolinguistic analyses based on primary data, including a reference grammar. The result is a detailed portrait of a previously undescribed language at the crossroads of African, Caribbean, and European linguistic ecologies.
African Caribbean English Creole (ACEC) is a language cluster of some forty varieties and about 150 million speakers that emerged from contact between African languages and English in West Africa and the Caribbean. Based on field data from both regions, this project has involved typological comparison, quantitative analyses, and sociolinguistic research of varieties as diverse as Nigerian Pidgin, Sranan, and Jamaican Creole. Findings show that ACEC varieties have evolved unique structures, reflecting their mixed heritage, contact with African and European languages, and profound social change.
Indian diaspora languages are little studied, yet they offer unique insights into multilingual contact. With the help of field data and linguistic description, we analyse features of Sarnami (Suriname), Mauritian Bhojpuri, and Khatri (India) – the latter through PhD research by Antonia Alvares. Comparison with field data from languages in contact – Gujarati and Marathi or and Sranan and Dutch – has enabled a fine-grained understanding of how multilingual speakers drive multidirectional change. More broadly, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of contact-induced change involving both related and unrelated languages.
Drawing on acoustic-phonetic and phonological analysis of field data, this project investigates prosodic systems born from contact between tone and stress across the Afro-Atlantic. Findings reveal an areal pattern: tone prevails in creoles and European colonial varieties spoken in Africa, stress in the Americas, and hybrid systems in the Caribbean. Further work has explored neurological aspects of tone production, and is now extending to lesser-known varieties of Swahili. The aim is a framework capturing the linguistic, cognitive, and social factors that shape prosodic contact outcomes across a wide range of scenarios.
Mabia (Gur) languages are spoken by millions in West Africa, yet many have not been described in detail. Based on extensive fieldwork in Ghana, this project has produced grammatical descriptions of Likpakpaln (also known as Konkomba) by Abraham Bisilki and of Buli by Darius Adjong. Subsequent work has involved typological and comparative analyses in co-authored publications. The aim is to contribute to the documentation a major language family of Africa while advancing our understanding of the structural properties of its member languages.
Lingala is one of Africa’s largest languages, yet its presence in Angola remains unstudied. Drawing on linguistic biographies, micro-surveys, participant observation, social network analysis, and linguistic analysis, this project investigates Lingala uses and social functions, attitudes and ideologies, as well as outcomes of contact with Kikongo, Portuguese, and French. Being the only African language still to attract new speakers in Angola, this research has implications for understanding the expansion of African lingua francas amid rapid social change.
This project investigates code-switching, with a focus on multilingual Suriname and Equatorial Guinea. Field data covers natural conversations spanning languages like Sranan, Sarnami, Javanese, Dutch, Spanish, and Pichi. Findings show that elements from different languages converge in a common communicative space in which code-switching is the normal way of speaking. The results challenge the widespread assumption of code-switching as exceptional, broadening the empirical and theoretical foundations of the research field.