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Language Science Press has recently published A grammar of Fwe by Hilde Gunnink (BantuGent).  This book is the published version of the PhD thesis she defended at Ghent University in 2018. The new grammar is volume 6 of LSP’s African Language Grammars and Dictionaries series and is fully downloadable here in open access.

This book provides a first-ever comprehensive overview of the grammatical structure of Fwe. Fwe is a Bantu language spoken on the border between Zambia and Namibia, by some 20,000 people. Very little previous documentation exists on the language, and the current description of Fwe is based exclusively on newly collected field data. It includes an analysis of the grammatical structure of Fwe, followed by basic cultural information on greetings, a Fwe narrative with its English translation, and a lexicon comprising some 2200 Fwe lexemes with their English translation. This book is intended as a resource for linguists, whether interested in African languages, Bantu languages, language typology, or general linguistics.

 

Minah Nabirye (BantUGent) and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent) have recently released with Menha Publishers a new book titled “Enkaana. Fieldwork Texts Compiled by David William Cohen on the History of the Basoga people“. More information on the book can be found here.

 

On July 7, 2022 the Tanzanian Embassy in Brussels and Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren co-organized the celebrations of the first International Kiswahili Day in Tervuren. On November 23, 2021, UNESCO officially designated July 7 as the International Day of Kiswahili, the first African language to be celebrated in this way and hopefully not the last.

Kiswahili is a Bantu language that originated on the East Coast of Africa and has become the most widely spoken language in East Africa. It has 80 million speakers, not only in Tanzania and Kenya where the language enjoys national and official language status, but also in other East African countries such as Comoros, eastern Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

Maud Devos (RMCA-BantUGent), Mary Charwi (DUCE Dar es Salaam – BantUGent associate), Gundelinda Shayo (former UGent Kiswahili teacher), Enock Mbiling’i (former UGent Kiswahili teacher), and Saskia Nissen, Droene Bex and Lennert Delfosse,  all three students of the UGent African Languages and Cultures program were closely involved in the organization of these celebrations in Tervuren. Check here for an interview with the ambassador of Tanzania in Brussels and with Prof. Maud Devos.

From June 28 until August 13, 2022, Guy Kouarata is doing again linguistic BantuFirst fieldwork on lesser known varieties of the Teke group (Bantu, B70), both in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville. Just like during his 2021 fieldwork campaign, he will collect new data to feed several ongoing historical-comparative linguistic investigations aiming at a better understanding of their classification within West-Coastal Bantu.

Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent) & Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) have a new article with BantuFirst research out in the Journal of Historical Linguistics. It is titled “Erratic velars in West-Coastal Bantu: Explaining irregular sound change in Central Africa“.

Jessamy Doman (BantUGent) co-authors with Emily Goble Early a synthesis chapter titled “Late Miocene and Earliest Pliocene Paleoecology of Africa”  in a new Cambridge University Press book on the African Paleoecology and Human Evolution co-edited by Sally C. Reynolds and René Bobe.

Nature Scientific Reports publishes a new article titled “A multi‑analytical characterization of fourteenth to eighteenth century pottery from the Kongo kingdom, Central Africa” with input from Bernard Clist (former member BantUGent) and Koen Bostoen (BantUGent). Research for this article was started as part of ERC-funded KongoKing project (2012-2016).

 

In this article an overview is given of the use of modal auxiliary verb constructions in East African Bantu (encompassing languages spoken from eastern Congo in the north-west to northern Mozambique in the south-east; viz. Guthrie zones JD, JE, E, F, G, M, N and P). Modality, here conceptualized as a semantic space comprising different subcategories (or flavors) of possibility and necessity, has traditionally been a neglected category within Bantu linguistics, which has tended to focus instead on the more grammatical(ized) categories of tense, aspect and to a lesser extent mood. Nonetheless, our survey shows that there exists a rich number of different verbs with specialized modal functions in East African Bantu. Moreover, when comparing the variety of modal verbs in East African Bantu and the wider constructions in which they operate, many similar patterns arise. In some cases, different languages make use of cognate verbs for expressing similar modal concepts, in other cases divergent verbs, but with essentially the same source meaning(s), are employed. In addition, both Bantu-internal and Bantu-external contact have played a key role in the formation of several of the languages’ inventories of modal verbs. A typologically significant feature recurrently discovered among the languages surveyed is the tendency of structural manipulations of the same verb base to indicate semantic shift from participant-internal to participant-imposed modal flavors.

Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) and Hilde Gunnink (BantUGent) have a chapter titled “The Impact of Autochthonous Languages on Bantu Language Variation: A Comparative View on Southern and Central Africa” in the newly published Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact: Volume 1: Population Movement and Language Change, edited by In S. Mufwene & A.M. Escobar.

The 9th International Conference on Bantu Languages (Bantu 9) was held at the Malawi University of Science and Technology in Blantyre from 7 to 10 June 2022. The program included several research papers involving BantUGent researchers (bold):

• Maud Devos,  Rasmus Bernander & Johan Van der Auwera: “Somebody interested in nobody? The specific and negative indefinites ‘somebody’ and ‘nobody’ in Bantu languages”
• Hilde Gunnink: “Contact and Inheritance in the development of lateral obstruents in Southern Bantu”
• Lorenzo Maselli ^,Véronique Delvaux, Jean-Pierre Donzo, Sara Pacchiarotti, Koen Bostoen: “Retroflex sounds in the Mai-Ndombe (DRC): the case of nasals in North Boma B82 and Nunu B822”
• Daisuke Shinagawa, Seunghun J. Lee & Lorenzo Maselli: “Postnasal trilling in Bantu cross-linguistic variation and typology overview”