Anne Maria Fehn

Biography

"I am a linguist with a special interest in the linguistic history of southern Africa. My main field of expertise lies with documentary linguistics and historical linguistics, and I take an avid interest in interdisciplinary approaches to population research. At present, my research focuses on the Khoe-Kwadi language family and on Herero dialects spoken in southwestern Angola. I hold an M.A. in African studies from the University of Cologne where I am currently finalizing my Ph.D. under supervision of Prof. Dr. em. Bernd Heine. From 2010 to 2013, I worked on the documentation of Ts’ixa, a highly endangered Kalahari Khoe language spoken in northern Botswana which has been shaped by contact between both related and unrelated Khoisan languages. Between 2012 and 2014, I was employed as a coordinator in the “Kalahari Basin Area” project led by Prof. Dr. Tom Güldemann of the Humboldt University in Berlin. This project focused on the population history of the Kalahari Basin and included cooperation between linguistics, molecular anthropology and cultural anthropology. Within the frame of a research cooperation between Prof. Güldemann and Prof. Jorge Rocha, I came to participate in CIBIO-InBIO’s ongoing research on the peopling of southwestern Angola. In 2014, I accompanied Prof. Rocha to the field and got to work with two rememberers of Kwadi, a language thought extinct since the 1960s. In addition, I did a survey of various dialects of the Bantu language Herero found in Namibe province, Angola, which will serve as a starting point for future research on Herero varieties spoken by former hunter-gatherers, in particular Kwissi and Twa."

Research Interest

Molecular anthropology and cultural anthropology