He is currently Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the West African Languages Institute (WALI)[1] at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB).
and in print media to present some of his work and provide expert opinion on social and political issues in Africa.
He has examined how speakers employ phonetic features like pitch, loudness, tempo, voice quality (e.g., creaky, plain and breathy phonation types), rhythm, as well as vowel and consonant quality to manage interactional categories like turn-taking, repair, overlapping talk, backchannel communications, concurrence, descensions, requests, apologies, cross-examinations as well as bad and good news delivery.
Obeng’s work on language and liberty[2] draws inspiration from Sir Isaiah Berlin’s (1960) Four Essays on Liberty and investigates how people with less power use resistive speech to challenge the validity claims of powerful political, judicial, health and religious actors.
African names, according to Obeng, provide us with insights into linguistic structure via morphophonology, syntax, semantics, ethnopragmatics, geography, history, politics and other human phenomena.