About
Martin is in his third year as a PhD student in Linguistics. His research in phonetics and sociophonetics centers around language change and language contact in southern Africa and beyond.
He is interested in these processes in diverse varieties of Afrikaans, and in Khoekhoe and southern Bantu languages, and in language attrition patterns, and the mutual influences between the regionally dominant and vulnerable languages. Martin is also interested in more anthropological aspects – personal histories, rituals and stories – of the communities he has worked with. He has also worked on child language acquisition in eleven languages in South Africa.
He is currently working on his Qualifying Research Paper which explores an ongoing sound change in the acoustic correlates of obstruent voicing in Orange River Afrikaans.
