Abbie Hantgan studied General and African Linguistics at Indiana University. For her Ph.D. dissertation project, she conducted extensive fieldwork on Bangime, a language isolate spoken among the Dogon inhabited cliffs of Mali. She came to SOAS in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow.
Her research interests lie in discerning the boundaries among languages at the phonetic and phonological levels. The Crossroads area is highly, fluidly multilingual, yet speakers are able to extract their individual languages in specific monolingual situations and identify others’ backgrounds based solely on their speech sounds and patterns. The concept of a foreign accent rather than dialectal variation is her primary focus within the project.
Her interests in phonology concern the analysis of autosegmental features, specifically tone, vowel harmony, and mora theory. Phonetic interests include subsegmental features such as centre of gravity. She has compiled the Crossroads team’s collection of data into an annotated searchable Elan corpus.
Crossroads 