" From any perspective, social activity is inseparable from communication, for which language provides both the model and the principal means." - Mary Dakubu, Korle meets the sea, 1995
I am a linguist. My research interests are the life cycles of pidgins, creoles and other outcomes of language contact, contact linguistics, sociocultural linguistics, language & identity, the morphosyntax-semantics interface and morphology with an interdisciplinary focus (anthropology, sociology, history).
Over the years, I have done field work in Suriname, Ghana and Togo and the Netherlands. Via archival research as well as experimental research I collected data on the Surinamese Creole languages, the Akan and Gbe languages of Ghana and Togo as well as multilingual language practices, including codeswitching, borrowing and transfer.
My dissertation A grammar of Early Sranan (2007) is a reconstruction of 18th century Sranantongo, a creole language that emerged on Surinamese plantations from the 1650s onwards, on the basis of a comparison of historical sources in and on Sranantongo with contemporary Ndyuka, the language of the Ndyuka people in Suriname. I also worked on a couple of language documentation projects. I was awarded a NWO Veni grant for my research project titled 'Creoles at birth? On the role of nativization in language formation' (2009 - 2015). This project combined historical and experimental linguistics to explore the complex relationships between social factors and linguistic processes that are involved in language emergence.
This website aims to inform you in more detail about my research. For more information about teaching, see my other website.