I am a linguist working in the Department for Language, Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund University (Germany). I am also a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State (South Africa).
My research interests include language documentation, description and revitalisation, language maintenance and shift, language policy, language contact, and language and education. My work focuses on linguistic diversity and minorities. I work predominantly with multilingual individuals and communities, who speak heritage, minority and/or endangered languages. I have a long-standing interest in research in southern Africa and have conducted linguistic fieldwork on a number of African languages, including N/uu (South Africa), siPhuthi (Lesotho), !Xun (Namibia) and ǂHoan (Botswana), and on German in Namibia and South Africa. I have also worked on my mother tongue, Gujarati, as spoken by diaspora communities living in England, Singapore and South Africa. |
News11 April 2024
Hot off the press: Our book on the South African German variety, Kroondal German, is out! It is open access and free to download here. Supporting sound files can be accessed here. 18 March 2024 Our article on the importance of collaboration between speakers and linguists in language documentation, published in the 2022 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL), has been featured in Scientia. Scientia adapts academic papers into accessible, magazine-style articles for the general public. Read the Scientia adaptation here and our original ARAL article here. Click here for more news. |
COVID-19 awareness materials now available in siPhuthi!
For more details, click here. #HlaleKhaya - #StayHome #Hlala_U_Phephiye - #StaySafe |
... AND IN OTHER NEWS: The President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, met with Katrina Esau during the National Heritage Day celebration held in Upington on 24 September 2019 and received a copy of our N/uu reader.
Check out our gallery to see who else enjoyed our N/uu reader! Left: Photo courtesy of the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB). |