By investigating how speakers of different African languages structure information in their grammar, Jenneke van der Wal unravels fundamental principles about how people articulate their thoughts. By looking beyond Eurocentric models of language, she is developing a fuller understanding of the human ability for language.
African languages as a window on the human mind
What determines how people communicate with each other? Linguistics has long sought universal principles – rules that apply to all languages. However, through her study of African languages, Jenneke van der Wal shows that we need to drastically revise our view of language.
Van der Wal does fundamental research on how different languages convey information and what that tells us about how people think and communicate. She focuses particularly on African languages, which comprise nearly 30 percent of all languages in the world. By looking beyond Eurocentric models of language and studying languages that work very differently from Indo-European languages, she arrives at a more comprehensive and richer understanding of human language.
One of her most important breakthroughs came from research into Bantu languages. She discovered that the way speakers mark new or surprising information is much more deeply embedded in grammar than previously thought. In Dutch we emphasise important new information by emphasis – ‘You did it!’ –, whilst Bantu languages can incorporate this kind of important information directly into the verb form or word order. This may seem like a small difference, but Van der Wal shows that it demonstrates a fundamentally different approach to language: one in which sentence structure is fundamentally determined by the information people exchange. The study of African languages has proved crucial to understanding human language ability in general.
What makes Van der Wals's approach special are the innovative methods she uses. Using Virtual Reality, she creates real-life situations such as a virtual market or classroom, in which she can accurately observe how the environment affects subtle language choices. She tailors fieldwork methods to the cultural context of African languages so that speakers use the language more naturally. She and her team also conducted pioneering brain research on speakers of Makhuwa-Enahara, a language spoken in Mozambique. This research showed that our brains process important information in the same way, even though different languages express it in very different ways. Crucial to the success of her approach is her collaboration with African linguists when designing and conducting her research.
Through her research and teaching, Van der Wal is committed to developing a new generation of African linguists. By organising research schools, she brings students and researchers together and strengthens cooperation between European and African universities.
In the coming years, Van der Wal will focus on how different languages incorporate ‘extra information’ into their grammar. For example, if someone says, ‘The movie must be good,’ this not only says something about the quality of the movie, but you also understand that this information is hearsay. By examining how different languages express these kinds of subtle meanings, she hopes to further understand how human language ability works.
Jenneke van der Wal (1981) studied African linguistics at Leiden University, where she also obtained her PhD in 2009. Since 2017, following appointments at Cambridge and Harvard, she has continued her research at the Leiden University Center for Linguistics. Van der Wal investigates how information between interlocutors affects grammar and how this differs across languages. To move beyond Eurocentric models of language, she focuses on African languages and collaborates with linguists at African universities. For this research she has won NWO Vidi and Vici grants, among others.
