I am Senior Lecturer for African Linguistics and Lecturer for Hausa.

From a geographical point of view I am mainly interested in West African languages, especially Hausa and other Chadic languages, Kanuri and its Saharan relatives, as well as Atlantic languages like Fulfulde, Wolof, and the Cangin languages. From a thematic point of view I am especially concerned with contact linguistics, language typology, as well as language description and documentation.

My main area of research in the past 20 years concerned various contact scenarios in the Wider Lake Chad Region. Between 2002 and 2010 I have been collaborator in two research projects dealing with the dynamics of linguistic change in north-eastern Nigeria. My Ph.D. thesis examines contact phenomena between the three languages of wider communication Hausa, Fulfulde, and Kanuri in the domain of adverbial subordination. In course of the projects I was also able to gather data on the Gashua variety of Bade.

In 2017 I was appointed member of the new permanent committee of BICCL (Biennial International Colloquium on the Chadic Languages), and I am also a member of the scientific committee of SYWAL (Symposium on West African Languages). In 2016 I organised the second conference (SYWAL2016) which took place at University of Vienna, and in 2019 I was the principal organizer of the 14th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics colloquium.

Since 2019 I am (together with Rainer Voßen) editor of “Schriften zur Afrikanistik/Research in African Studies".