Martin Mössmer

Martin is third year PhD candidate in Linguistics. His research in phonetics and sociophonetics centers around language change and language contact in southern Africa and beyond.

He recently completed his Qualifying Research Paper which explored an ongoing sound change in the acoustic correlates of plosive voicing in Orange River Afrikaans.

He is interested in understanding the interaction of production, perception, and cognitive representations of sound. His current research examines these processes in diverse varieties of Afrikaans, as well as in Khoekhoe and southern Bantu languages. He is also interested in language attrition patterns, and the mutual influences between the regionally dominant and vulnerable languages. Martin has also done work on more anthropological aspects – personal histories, rituals and stories – of the communities he has worked with. He worked on child language acquisition in eleven languages in South Africa, and is still involved with the project.