Language encapsulates the culture and history of those who speak it. While my work focuses on documenting the structures of little-known languages, I do so with an emphasis on what those structures tell us about the society who developed that language — how and where they live and what other cultures and languages they may have interacted with.

As such, my research falls primarily within language documentation but draws heavily upon linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.

My recent work examines field data on the color terms of Moba, a Gur language of Togo, and Edo, a Volta-Niger language of Nigeria, to explore how those color terms reveal insights into the sociocultural lives of their speakers.