About me – Mark Dingemanse

I am a linguist based in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. My research focuses on human language, with a special focus on how language is shaped by and for social interaction. My views on language are informed by long-term fieldwork in eastern Ghana, comparative research on a diverse range of languages, and collaborations with anthropologists, psycholinguists, and cognitive scientists.

As a first generation PhD in my family, I didn’t actually know what a PhD was until my 4th year at university. I studied African Languages & Linguistics and worked as a web designer & developer on the side. After a rejected PhD application at Leiden University, my company became a full-time job, but I also sent out one last-ditch application to Steve Levinson’s department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. To my great surprise and delight, I was awarded a competitive MPI fellowship and the rest, as they say, is history.

I still love to tinker with HTML and CSS, though nobody pays me for it anymore. You can read more about my background in this 2020 interview (in Dutch). I greatly enjoy thinking, writing, finding out new things, and working with diverse people. A combination of talent, opportunity and privilege has so far allowed me to do this in academia. I do not take any of this for granted.

Three books that are important to me, in the order in which I discovered them:

Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, for providing a taste of cognitive science at its best: playful, curious, and without limits in terms of topic or method.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, for capturing the complexities and ambiguities that are part of the story of humans through place and time.
Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, for combining a deep anthropological sensititivity with an awe-inspiring cosmic perspective on human diversity.

Below are some recent photos that can be used for publicity purposes. The official-looking ones by Milette Raats were made on the occasion of the Heineken Young Scientists Award in 2020.