I was born in Minden, which is the hometown of Franz Boas. After I studied English, Linguistics, Mathematics and Educational Sciences at the University
of Bielefeld., I decided that I was not cut out to be a computational linguist or mathematician. I therefore decided to come to Kent and be a field linguist. My suppervisors are Michael D. Fischer and Bruce Connell.
Sascha Griffiths: PhD candidate
I studied English, Linguistics, Mathematics and Educational Sciences at the University of Bielefeld. My Master thesis is Expressive Speech and Expressive Speech Output for HCI. It concentrates on a phonetic model of paralinguistic and extra-linguistic features of prosody for use in speech synthesis. My supervisors for this were Prof. Dafydd Gibbon and Dr. Stefan Kopp.
In the 1990s linguists and other experts on language raised the awareness of a global threat to linguistic diversity. The contrast between global and local languages grew stronger. Global languages are languages like Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi or Spanish. These are also referred to as World languages. Local languages are linguistic systems such as Low German, Welsh, Pirahã, Dyirbal, Tofa, Kwanja or Ega. One such language is Wawa; the language I am working on.