Martin Mössmer

Linguist, PhD student, cook

My name is Martin Mössmer, and I am a PhD student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I have an MA and BA(Hons) in Linguistics from the University of Cape Town.

Originally from Pretoria, South Africa, I moved to Cape Town in 2007 to study the culinary arts. For the next few years I worked as a chef, before opening a bakery in the Muizenberg village. After four years of kneading dough and many 3 am’s, I decided to go to university. There, in 2014, linguistics stormed in and took over my life and many of my interests! I have been studying, researching, and working in Linguistics ever since.

My broad research interests include phonetics and phonology, language contact, and language maintenance and loss. More narrowly, I am interested the insights into sound change that the sound systems of Afrikaans varieties, Bantu languages, and the 'Khoisan' languages, of southern Africa can provide for our understanding of language. The patterns of contact, mutual influence, and language attrition and shift in this region provides unique contexts for observing social and phonetic change in action. 

I am also interested in more anthropological aspects (personal histories, memory, ritual) of the communities I have worked with in the Northern Cape, South Africa.

My research background

My first experience of research was riding along with my dad on fieldwork trips to document the art in many of South Africa's rock art sites, the cultural legacy of indigenous herders and hunter-gatherers. As a teenager, my first summer job was at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, cataloguing and archiving legacy research materials of a prolific amateur rock art researcher.

Later, while doing my BA Honours at the University of Cape Town, I used my archival experience to reconstruct the linguistic history of an indigenous group known as the Griekwa today. The Griewka group came to be during the partial social disintegration of many indigenous societies during Dutch colonisation. According to the prevailing scholarly wisdom, the language known to linguists as Xri, the Griekwa group's main language (before they shifted to Orange River Afrikaans), was 'extinct' and had been moribund for the better part of a century. But there was a small chance that there might still be a handful of people alive who had parents or grandparents who had been speakers of Xri.

My MA took me into the field to try to track down anyone who had a memory of Xri being spoken. Against all expectations, we encountered two elderly women with Xri knowledge, one of whom had spoken the language daily in her youth. I returned to the field several times, finding two more speakers and many rememberers of this supposedly 'extinct' language. I worked with members of several Griekwa communities in the Northern Cape province of South Africa to document the Xri language, their memories of how the language faded from daily use, their experiences and disposession during Apartheid, and their personal histories.

While completing my MA thesis, I started working with Professor Heather Brookes and Child Language Africa (also at the University of Cape Town) on a large and ambitious project to create a baseline of knowledge about child language acquisition in South Africa's twelve official spoken languages. The objective was to eventually adapt, localise and validate the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (first developed at Stanford University) for infants and toddlers in each of these languages. I first got involved in the project as administrative and logistical support and quickly joined the research and development teams of the CDIs. The project grew as funding increased, and over the next four years of my inolvement in running the project we had a team of dozens of academics (faculty), over 100 fieldworkers, and a core team of five coordinating the scientific and logistical organisation. The project is still running and is the single largest linguistics project ever undertaken in South Africa.

Currently, the research focus for my PhD at the University of Michigan is still on the Griekwa communities in the Northern Cape. I look at the variety of Afrikaans that all community members now speak and try to understand the acoustic, phonetic, and phonological influences of Khoekhoe language contact, ongoing local social pressures, and the broader South African context on these communities and their language.

I'm also working on research projects led by Professor Andries Coetzee, looking at socio-phonetic variation in other varieties of Afrikaans, the Afrikaans spoken by an old (for Afrikaans!) diaspora community in Patagonia, Argentina, and other phonetic and phonological aspects of the language.