No. 114/2022

28 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 114/2022 CLOSE UP ON RESEARCH just as relevant today. Now as then, social participation has not really embraced migrant communities in Germany, according to Yakpo. In the mid-1990s, he quit the music scene, started travelling and doing research for his Master’s thesis. His first destination was Vanuatu, an island state in the South Pacific. “I returned to Germany from this trip absolutely euphoric and charged up,” Yakpo remembers. He wanted to continue his research but did not know how. “Doctor- ate, habilitation – the whole procedure was a bit of a mys- tery to me.” He would have needed advice, a mentor. But at the time, there was no such person around. The lack of prospects shattered his illusions – which is why he initially set off in a completely different direction. “Getting away from this narrow Germany,” as he puts it. He studied management and law in Geneva and London, then worked for the human rights organisation FIAN International (FoodFirst Information and Action Network) and subsequently for the Greens at the Bundestag in Berlin. Today, Kofi Yakpo combines the various elements of his life in his academic work in Hong Kong: instead of hip-hop rhymes, it is now his research results that reveal colonial structures and debunk racist myths. One such myth is that Creole languages are simplified languages. Yakpo has managed to prove that many Creole languages are tone languages in which the pitch changes the meaning of a word and the grammar – a concept that is foreign to European languages. “The assumption that Creole languages don’t use a tone system is based on the idea that because we’re not familiar with it, it’s complicated. And because the Africans dragged into slavery couldn’t be ‘complicated’ by definition, Creole languages couldn’t be tone languages,” says Yakpo. Within linguistics, his research field is highly political and controversial. It addresses the colonial legacy and thus often also racist thinking and stereotypical assumptions within his own discipline, which tends to be Eurocentric. IN AFRICA LANGUAGE IS ALLOWED TO CHANGE Whilst working as a Humboldt Research Fellow in Berlin, he recently explored another path: “I wanted to know how languages develop when they are not standardised by written forms or state authorities.” After all, strict language standardisation is ultimately a European concept. In Europe, language is seen as something that is not supposed to change. “In West Africa, it’s different,” says Yakpo. “Variation is quite normal.” Socio-economic aspects are also a feature of his research. Yakpo discovered that participation opportunities and advancement expectations influence the degree to which languages are changed by hybridisation. In this context, he developed the concept of social anchoring. He has demonstrated, for example, that Nigerian Pidgin, which is spoken by 100 to 150 million people today, in all likelihood derived from a small community of Krio-speaking African slaves from Sierra Leone who were released by the British navy from illegal slave transportation off the coast of West Africa and brought to Freetown in the 19th century. “They played a kind of intermediary role between two social classes in what was then a British crown colony and the whole of West Africa,” Yakpo explains. “They were teachers, missionaries and traders with privileged access to the British colonial system and to African society at the same time.” Their enhanced social prestige was an incentive for the majority of Nigerian society to learn their language. “Speakers of the minority language, Krio, had an interest in interacting with the majority population,” says Yakpo. FIELDWORK: Kofi Yakpo with Bhojpuri-speaking young people on Mauritius in 2012. Bhojpuri came to Mauritius during the British colonial period and is now the second most-common language there. / The picture on the right shows a workshop on language documentation at the University of Malaya, Malaysia, in 2019.