Affiliation: Ghent University
Keywords: Historical linguistics, Niger-Congo languages, Chibchan languages, interdisciplinary approaches to the human past
Full profile: My research trajectory has been led by fascination for why language structures are the way they are and what are the evolutionary pathways that made them be that way, including the impact that extralinguistic factors might have on language change.
The passion for understudied Amerindian languages pushed me to independently seek and obtain an MA in linguistics with special emphasis on indigenous Costa Rican languages (Chibchan) at the Universidad de Costa Rica (Costa Rica). Thanks to Fulbright, I could pursue a PhD in linguistics at the University of Oregon (USA) famous for linguistic functionalism and the study of underdocumented languages. A nine-month fieldwork class on Mòoré (Niger-Congo, Burkina Faso) during my doctoral training revived connections with Africa that were established during the seven years I spent in Nigeria in my early childhood.
This newly (re)discovered interest for Africa was kindled by an unexpected change in dissertation topic nine months before the due date which led me to write about applicative constructions in Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages. This seemingly haphazard shift in focus towards Africa gained a teleological dimension when I obtained a postdoctoral position in African historical linguistics within the ERC-funded interdisciplinary BantuFirst project at Ghent University (Belgium).
After obtaining my own FWO (Flanders Research Foundation)-funded postdoctoral project, in 2023 I was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant and became associate professor in linguistics at Ghent University. My ERC project (CongUBangi, 2024-2028) aims at understanding the present-day interconnections between language, material cultures and genes in the Congo-Ubangi watershed (northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo) and project them as far back into the past as possible through a holistic, localized and locally-enforced interdisciplinary approach featuring linguistics, archaeology, and genetics. The goal is to realize a breakthrough in our understanding of how linguistic diversity correlates with cultural and genetic diversity and why it originated and persisted in this specific ecoregion for millennia.