Dr Jakob Lesage
- Foto
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- Name
- Dr Jakob Lesage
- Status
- Field assistant
- jakob.lesage (at) hu-berlin.de
- Institution
- Humboldt-Universität → Präsidium → Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät → Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften → Afrikanische Sprachen
- Visiting address
- Invalidenstraße 118 , Room 411
- Phone number
- (030) 2093 66006
- Consultation hours
- by arrangement via email
- Mailing address
- Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin Courses
Teaching
I am open to supervising BA and MA theses focused on or incorporating African languages. Reach out to me if you're interested!
In the 2024/25 Winter Semester, I'm offering a course on Language in West Africa, which creates a space to acquire existing knowledge together, have open discussions, and co-create new contributions relevant to people in West Africa and people from the West African diaspora in Berlin.
Interested students can reach out to me with any questions. Everyone is welcome. The course is taught in English and is very international student friendly.
Research
I'm a linguist specializing in African languages, with particular expertise in language in Nigeria.
My work focuses on documenting endangered or understudied languages. My research and publications, have contributed to the description and analysis of Kam, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Central-Eastern Nigeria. My recent research on kam emphasizes natural interaction and community-driven ethnographic documentation.
I also research remote collaboration methods for language documentation (also called distributed fieldwork or remote fieldwork) for language documentation, which makes language documentation less dependent on fieldwork travel and has, among others, potential to create more equitable partnerships in African linguistics.
In addition to my expertise in African languages, I contribute to linguistic typology through my work on typological databases like Grambank. My publications have highlighted gaps in grammatical descriptions and the insights that can be gained from using typological databases for cross-linguistic comparison.
My research also explores the history and spread of languages, words, and concepts in sub-Saharan Africa through interdisciplinary approaches. This involves identifying layers of language contact, applying historical linguistics, and tracing the spread of cultural and technological vocabulary such as words for 'iron'.
Student advising
As of the 2024/25 Winter Semester, I'm the Student Advisor for the African Studies department. My office hours are on Tuesdays from 13:00 to 15:00 during the teaching period. If these times don’t work for you, I’m happy to arrange a meeting outside of office hours, either in person, online, or by phone. Feel free to send me an e-mail to schedule an appointment.