No. 114/2022

26 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 114/2022 FORSCHUNG HAUTNAH The turning point, that is, the moment he decided to focus exclusively on research, came in 2008. He was working for Thilo Hoppe, then a member of the Green Party in the Bundestag, as a political advisor on food security in Africa. “I was living a sort of double life,” he says and laughs. One part was his work at the Bundestag, the other his research in linguistics. Alongside that, he completed his doctorate: the first complete grammar of Pichi, an Afro-Caribbean Creole language. When it was finished, he showed it to colleagues at the Bundestag, Yakpo relates. “One person leafed through and said: I don’t understand it at all. That’s totally different from what you do here. Either you’re an impostor or you have a split personality.” That was when Yakpo realised that he had to plump for linguistics, his true passion. WE DIDN’T RESPECT LIMITS “At the time I thought, if I can get up on stage and entertain a thousand people, I can become a professor, too,” says Yakpo and has to laugh again. That was his hip-hop ego speaking. “It was just the way we were on the hip-hop scene. We knew there were limits, but we didn’t respect them.” After a three-year stint as a postdoc in theNetherlands, he started looking for jobs worldwide. “Academia in Germany was too complicated and opaque for my liking,” he explains. “I couldn’t understand how you could make progress as a researcher in Germany, so I didn’t bother to apply there in the first place.” In Hong Kong, where he is now teaching and doing his research, the prospects for promotion are clear. “Here you start off as a student, then you become an assistant professor and then a professor,” says Yakpo. The intervals between the various steps are also standardised. “They don’t have all the intermediate positions and fixed- term contracts that you get in Germany.” Another thing Yakpo has observed about the German research system is a lack of diversity. Even in African Studies, he notes, the higher the position, the less diverse the appointments – an observation he not only made as a student. As a Humboldt Research Fellow at Humboldt- T wice in his life, Kofi Yakpo has made a name for himself as a linguist: Once as a rapper in the German hip-hop band, Advanced Chemistry, where his stage name was “Linguist”. The 1992 single “Fremd im eigenen Land” (Foreigner in my own country) made the band famous whilst his academic career only began shortly before his 40th birthday. Since 2013, Yakpo has been teaching linguistics at the University of Hong Kong und conducting research into Afro-Caribbean Creole languages: languages that develop when two or more languages converge and form a new one. This kind of hybridisation emerged during the colonial era, the linguistics professor explains, often under duress. And although there are nearly 200 million speakers of Creole languages worldwide, unlike European languages, so far, they have often not been studied sufficiently. The fact that he has this second career as a researcher at all, says Yakpo, is not just a result of his huge interest in languages but also because of his hip-hop outlook. “As hip-hoppers, our attitude was: I am large. We were always brimming with confidence.” At the time of our video conference, Yakpo is in Nairobi, Kenya, where he is exploring the linguistic variants of Swahili. Kofi Yakpo was once a big shot in German rap. Today, he is a professor of linguistics, researching into the emergence of Creole languages and uncovering the colonial legacy of his subject along the way. By MARLENE HALSER THE LINGUIST CLO E UP ON RESEARCH