Dr Friederike Lüpke awarded Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award, receiving almost £1 million in funding
9 November 2012
Dr Friederike Lüpke, a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics, received Leverhulme Trust funding of £999,631 for her project ‘Crossroads - investigating the unexplored side of multilingualism’.
Dr Lüpke’s project, due to start in January 2014, will research multilingualism in and language contact between three languages spoken at the "crossroads”, which is a group of neighbouring villages in the Casamance area of Senegal (West Africa). The languages are Baïnounk Gubëeher, Joola Kujirerai and Joola Eegimaa. A fourth language, Baïnounk Gujaher, spoken outside the crossroads area, will serve as a control language.
The five-year project will look at social networks and the differences in language use in them. This will reveal in which areas the languages influence each other least and most in structure, lexicon and speech-accompanying gesture.
Led by Dr Lüpke, the team will include six PhD students, three postdoctoral researchers and two project coordinators. Two of the postdoctoral researchers currently participate in the AHRC Skills Development Scheme “Language research and teaching in a multilingual world” hosted by SOAS to prepare themselves for the project.
Commenting on the award, Dr Lüpke said: "It is an amazing opportunity to be able to continue my research on the languages of Casamance in an interdisciplinary team.
Only funding of this scale enables me to look beyond individual languages at the repertoires and choices of speakers in a highly multilingual environment, and at the linguistic and cognitive consequences of multilingual language use in such a context."
Leverhulme Research Leadership Awards enables university researchers to investigate an innovative research question in order to establish themselves as research leaders in their field.
