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About

I am a linguist interested in language diversity and its evolution, as well as African linguistics, language contact, and multilingualism. I grew up bilingual in English and Danish, alternating between living in Copenhagen and London throughout my life, which gave me an early appreciation for the diverse ways in which different languages allow us to express ourselves. 

I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, where I developed an interest in studying the incredible breadth of diversity found in the world’s languages through both fieldwork and computational methods. During my Master’s degree at Leiden University, I deepened my interest in linguistic typology and language diversity with a focus on African linguistics, including contact languages and signed languages on the continent. As part of my thesis, I did fieldwork in South Africa, where I examined some effects of multilingualism on multimodal language use in the country’s major cities.

As a PhD student at the University of Tübingen, I developed Bayesian spatial models for the study of language contact in R and Stan with a focus on understanding the social and geographical drivers of language diversification and language change in Africa.

Some words I have written

Spatial models of linguistic data in Africa and beyond. 2025. PhD dissertation, University of Tübingen.

Spatial effects with missing data. 2024. Open Linguistics. (With Matías Guzmán Naranjo and Matthias Urban).

Estimating areal effects in typology: A case study of African phoneme inventories. 2022. Linguistic Typology. (With Matías Guzmán Naranjo).

Language Contact and Expressiveness: Ideophones, gestures and code-switching among young Zulu speakers in South Africa. MA thesis, Leiden University, 2019. (Supervised by Victoria Nyst).