Sara Petrollino is a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She is an anthropological linguist specialised in languages and cultures of East Africa. She studies the relationship between language, culture and cognition, so how do the languages we speak and the cultures we live in affect our cognition, and our worldviews? She has been working for more than 10 years with the Hamar pastoralists, and other ethnic groups of South West Ethiopia.

More information about Sara Petrollino

Fields of interest

• Anthropological Linguistics
• Cross-cultural semantics
• African linguistics
• Environmental linguistics

Research

I am a linguist specialised in anthropological linguistics and African languages. I am fascinated by questions related to linguistic relativity and the role played by language and culture in shaping worldviews and affecting cognition. My research takes place at the intersection of linguistics and anthropology, and as such it is based on traditional ethnographic methods and long-term fieldwork among communities in East Africa. In the last decade I have carried out most of my research among the Hamar pastoralists of South-West Ethiopia, and I have been studying their language and their linguistic and cultural practices.

Grants and awards

Memberships and other

I am on the exectutive boards of the Nederlandse Vereniging voor Afrikastudies/Dutch Association for Africa Studies (NVAS), The  Omo Valley Research project, on the editorial board of Language Sciences (Elsevier), and I am co-editor of the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics (De Gruyter). 

PhD supervision

Besides supervising PhD candidates at LUCL, I am also in the PhD committee for the PhD candidate Frank Onuh at the University of Lethbridge (2024-2026), Canada. Thesis title: Epistemic Alienation and the (Un)making of Truth: An interrogation of Language, Power and Patronage in Africa. 

Publications