Beyond Arlington

Tuesday, Aug 11, 2026 • Jayce K. Smith : Contact

For Danielle Quaye, traveling to Ghana was about more than studying abroad. It was an opportunity to contribute new knowledge to a field that has historically overlooked many of the world's languages.

A fifth-year doctoral candidate in Linguistics and TESOL, Quaye spent the summer conducting dissertation research on Gã, a lesser-studied language spoken in Accra. Her work examines how speakers produce and perceive speech sounds that challenge long-standing assumptions in phonetics and phonology while highlighting the importance of including minority and Indigenous languages in linguistic research.

While in Ghana, Quaye also collaborated with researchers from Yale University and The Ohio State University to collect Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) data at the Bureau of Ghana Languages. The advanced methodology captures the movement of the tongue, lips, and jaw during speech production, making the project one of only a handful of its kind conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For Quaye, the experience carried personal meaning as well as academic significance. As a member of the Ghanaian diaspora, the opportunity allowed her to reconnect with her heritage while conducting research that supports greater representation, linguistic preservation, and scientific understanding.