Description of research and teaching

I am a  researcher in General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. In September 2025, I am starting as an Associate Researcher (Chargé de Recherches) at Lacito, CNRS.

I received my PhD at Inalco (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) in 2015 and spent almost three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. I came to Helsinki in 2017 to work at the Helsinki University Humanities Programme (2017-2020).

My research sits at the intersection of descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. I am a committed fieldworker, specializing in Mande languages of West Africa. I am especially interested in language contact and multilingualism which I approach holistically, my toolkit including ethnographic, variationist and theoretical perspectives. My current research project supported by a grant from the Kone Foundation and by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award studies diasporic communities of Mano and Kpelle speakers in Conakry (Guinea) and Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) and focuses on psycholinguistic aspects of heritage language development.

My CV with pdfs of most publications can be found here.

My personal website gives a fuller overview of my research projects and a glimpse on the ongoing work.

Education information

I earned my PhD in Linguistics, summa cum laude, from Inalco, Paris, France, in 2015, my MA in Sociology from Collège Universitaire Français, Moscow, Russia, in 2011, my MA and BA in Linguistics from Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, in 2010.