- Name:
- Heather Ayn Todd
- Email address:
- h_todd@soas.ac.uk
- Thesis title:
- A cross-linguistic areal comparison of the semantics of ethnobotanical knowledge in Cameroon
Internal Supervisors
Biography
Heather has a BA in Linguistics and an MSc in Ethnobotany. Her master’s research examined the relationship of language loss and ethnobotanical knowledge by focusing Wawa, an endangered language spoken in rural Cameroon. She assessed whether factors that drive the loss of language also influence ethnobotanical knowledge and found that ethnobotanical knowledge is not necessarily lost when speakers shift to another local, non-European language.
PhD Research
Heather’s main interests are in linguistic anthropology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and the interconnections of language and traditional ecological knowledge. Her PhD research involves examining the interrelatedness of language and ethnobotanical knowledge through a comparative lexical and semantic analysis of the ways plant knowledge is encoded in a selected group of related and unrelated languages near Banyo, Cameroon, while also focusing on several endangered languages of the area.