My research examines language contact and change with emphasis on Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Through fieldwork, qualitative and quantitative analysis, I investigate how languages evolve when their speakers interact. How do grammars change? How do social dynamics shape the outcomes of language contact? My research, pursued together with a network of collaborators, is currently organised into the following themes:
African Caribbean English Creole (ACEC) is a language cluster of some forty varieties and 150 million speakers that emerged from contact between African languages and English. Based on field data from across West Africa and the Caribbean, this project involves typological comparison, quantitative analyses, and sociolinguistic research on varieties as diverse as Nigerian Pidgin and Tobagonian Creole. The findings challenge many assumptions about language change — including claims that creoles are structurally exceptional. Rather, a shared history, contact with African, European, Indigenous, and Asian languages, and powerful social dynamics have combined to shape the unique characteristics of ACEC varieties.
Indian diaspora languages remain understudied, yet they offer unique insights into multilingual contact. Drawing on field data and linguistic description, the project examines 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, among them Gujarati and Marathi, Sranan and Dutch, has allowed for a fine-grained understanding of how multilingual speakers drive multidirectional change, shedding new light on contact-induced change involving both related and unrelated languages.
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 creoles, 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.
How do linguistic, cognitive, and social factors shape prosodic outcomes when tone and stress languages come into contact? This project addresses the question through acoustic and phonological analysis of field data from Africa and the Americas, revealing striking areal patterns: tone prevails in creoles and European colonial varieties spoken in Africa, stress in the Americas, and hybrid systems in the Caribbean. Further work is now extending to lesser-known varieties of Swahili, while parallel research has explored neurological aspects of tone production.
Mabia (Gur) languages are spoken by millions across West Africa, yet many have not been described in detail. Extensive fieldwork in Ghana has produced grammatical descriptions of Likpakpaln (also known as Konkomba) by Abraham Bisilki and of Buli by Darius Adjong, complemented by typological and comparative analyses in co-authored publications. This work contributes to the documentation of a major African language family while deepening our understanding of the structural properties of its member languages.
In many societies, speakers routinely draw on more than one language in everyday conversation. This project investigates such practices through field data from natural conversations in Suriname and Equatorial Guinea, 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 default way of speaking. These results question the widespread treatment of code-switching as exceptional, broadening the empirical and theoretical foundations of the field.
Lingala is one of Africa’s largest languages, yet its presence in Angola remains unstudied. Drawing on linguistic biographies, surveys, participant observation, social network analysis, and linguistic analysis, this project investigates how Lingala is used and what social functions it serves, the attitudes and ideologies surrounding it, and its interaction with Kikongo, Kimbundu, Portuguese, and French. As the only African language still gaining new speakers in Angola, it offers a window into the expansion of African lingua francas amid rapid social change on the continent.
