About
Martin is in his third year as a PhD student in Linguistics. His research in phonetics and sociophonetics centres around language change and language contact in southern Africa and beyond.
He is more broadly interested in these processes in varieties of ‘non-standard’ Afrikaans, and Khoekhoe ('Khoisan') languages, and the mutual influences between regionally dominant and vulnerabel languages, and patterns in language attrition. Martin is also interested in more anthropological aspects—folklore 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 by looking at acoustic correlates of obstruent voicing in Orange River Afrikaans.
