No. 114/2022

29 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 114/2022 PROFESSOR DR KOFI YAKPO is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Hong Kong, China. In 2020/21, he was a Humboldt Research Fellow in the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin. Under the stage name “Linguist”, he and his band, Advanced Chemistry, wrote musical history. Yakpo has also written plays and short stories and was the recipient of the 2004 May Ayim Award for Black German Literature. But this is not always the case – as the history of language and cultural hybridisation in the Caribbean illustrates. “The hierarchy that was created by the colonial system and slavery was so strict that the Africans who arrived in the Caribbean in chains were not the least interested in learn- ing the language of the colonial rulers.” So, says Yakpo, they quickly and radically changed the English language. “A kind of reflex reaction to their lack of opportunities to participate and advance in society.”This finding also con- tradicts the widely held theory that African slaves in the Caribbean were not capable of learning correct English and, from necessity, had merely simplified the bits and pieces they had picked up and supplemented them with their own languages. Ultimately, what Yakpo is really concerned with in his research is agency, with Africans’ capacity to act and their resilience, with linguistic research that treats the speakers of Creole languages as acting subjects. In order to conduct this debate within the discipline he is more than willing to battle it out in public with what he refers to as “bling- bling linguists” – researchers who try to attract attention by proposing highly-simplified arguments. “I enjoy debates like that,” he says. Here, too, Kofi Yakpo, the Linguist, benefits from his hip-hop alter ego. Photos: private, Eugene Tam “ IN EUROPE LANGUAGE IS SEEN AS SOMETHING THAT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO CHANGE. IN WEST AFRICA, IT’S DIFFERENT.”