Welcome to my home page. I do fieldwork-based research in Ghana, West-Africa. I'm currently trying to find out when and why speakers of Siwu use ideophones.

Ideophones are marked words that vividly depict sensory events, like English kerplop or Siwu mukumuku 'mouth movements of a toothless person eating', nyɛnɛnɛ 'sensation of shivering' , and wiriwiri 'small things dispersed in great numbers'.

Siwu (Akpafu-Lolobi) is an underdocumented Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken by approximately ten thousand Mawu people in Kawu, north of Hohoe in Ghana's Volta Region. (More information on the fieldsite.)

My research interests include the interplay of language, culture, cognition, and the perceptual world. I'm also interested in evolutionary approaches to language in its broader context. Within the Language & Cognition group I'm currently involved in the following projects: Language of Perception; Ideophones and Sound-Symbolism; and Synaesthesia across cultures.

Head over to my weblog The Ideophone for some light reading on African languages, sound symbolism, and anthropological linguistics.