RESEARCH

I work on the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and language contact in urban West Africa, the Sahara, and the Maghreb, and on the phonology and morphology of the Atlantic  languages, especially Wolof, Pulaar and Sereer.

My sociolinguistic interests center on the ways in which outcomes of language contact are modulated by societal considerations such as urbanization, Islamization, and (colonial and postcolonial) power relationships between speakers of various languages, and I am particularly interested in urban ways of speaking and in the sociolinguistics of everyday writing in African languages.

My formal linguistic interests include consonant mutation and its interaction with other phonological processes such as reduplication and loanword adaptation; noun classification; and Fula prosody across dialects. Much of my work in these areas can be viewed on my publications page.  My current work is on the sociolinguistics of writing in African languages from the Maghreb to the Sahel.  You can see more information on this project on my NEH page.  In spring of 2022 I conducted research in Algeria for this project on a Fulbright research grant.

My research is based on extensive fieldwork in West Africa and has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation, as well as by several UF internal grants.  I am a former Director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, and I  have taught at the Université Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, Niger and at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal.

In the field in Assekrem, southern Algerian Sahara, May 2022  (Photo by Adolfo Ayuso Audry)