Hasiyatu Abubakari is an Associate Professor of African Linguistics at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, where she serves as Head of the Language, Literature and Drama Unit. She is a scholar of African languages, linguistics and oral traditions whose interdisciplinary research brings together descriptive and theoretical linguistics, onomastics, folklore, language and gender, environmental humanities, popular culture and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
She holds a PhD in African Studies (Languages and Literatures) from the University of Vienna, Austria, and an MPhil in Theoretical Linguistics from the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her research focuses particularly on Kusaal and other Mabia languages of West Africa, while extending to questions of cultural heritage, gender, environmental sustainability, language documentation, Indigenous knowledge and the use of oral and popular cultural forms for social transformation.
Professor Abubakari has led and collaborated on several externally and internally funded research projects. These include projects on the documentation of Kusaal folktales; sustainable environmental education and climate-change activism through popular culture; sustainable cultural education through oral narratives in Mabia communities; and the interface between Indigenous Knowledge Systems and climate science. Her research increasingly explores how African oral traditions, languages and Indigenous knowledge can contribute to responses to contemporary challenges such as climate change, environmental degradation, gender inequality and cultural and linguistic endangerment.
Her scholarship has appeared in international journals including Language & Communication, Language Sciences, Linguistics, Folklore, Agenda, Languages, International Journal of Language and Culture, Studies in African Linguistics, Studia Linguistica, Nordic Journal of African Studies, and Cogent Arts & Humanities. She is also co-editor of The Kusaas: An Indigenous Perspective (2024) and the Handbook of the Mabia Languages of West Africa (2020).
She is the founder of Popculture and Development, an initiative that connects academic research with communities by documenting, preserving and mobilising African oral traditions and popular cultural resources for education, cultural sustainability, gender equality, environmental awareness and sustainable development.
