Archives: Events

The Bantu languages are the largest African language family, both in terms of number of languages and speakers and geographical distribution. About 350 million or about one in three Africans speak one or more of the 500 or so Bantu languages, which stretch from above the equator to South Africa. Swahili, Lingala, Kongo, Luba, Rwanda, Rundi, Ganda, Zulu, Xhosa, and Shona are just some of the best-known Bantu languages. Proto-Bantu is about 5000 years old and is said to have been born in the border area between Nigeria and Cameroon. This lecture is about the reconstruction of this hypothetical ancestral language, about the exceptionally rapid and large-scale diffusion of its daughter languages and about the history and future of the study area.

https://www.historischetalen.be/cursus/twaalf-smaakmakers/

Contact (in case you want to attend through Zoom):

Sifra Van Acker (sifra.vanacker@ugent.be)

Lorenzo Maselli (lorenzo.maselli@ugent.be)

For the MS-teams link, write to Kim.Groothuis@UGent.be.

In studies on African lexical tone languages, intonation is often approached either as emergent from the cumulative effects of local interactions between sub-tonal features like the register feature (Welmers, 1959; Inkelas & al, 1986; Connell & Ladd, 1990; Clements, 1979) or as limited to domain boundary manifestations (Rialland, 2007). When global effects are mentioned, they are often treated as phonetic in nature (Inkelas & al, 1986; a.o), supposedly because they match the predictions of the Frequency Code, which holds that questions are realized with a higher pitch than statements (Gussenhoven, 2002; Cahill, 2013). Here, we present the results of a case study (production and perception) of yes/no question intonation in Ede Chaabe (cbj, Benin). We found that questions’ register is lower and not higher, but also have a L% edge tone known to characterize ‘lax’ prosody languages (Rialland, 2009); hence contrary to the Frequency Code. Considering these findings, we argue that the observed global effects are represented in the grammar in the form of a Register feature, which is treated in the present account as an intonational feature than spans specific prosodic domains. We go a step further in proposing a new sub-tonal feature model that does not use a register feature (like previous models do), but rather treats lexical tones as pitch change instructions, where Polarity (+/-) indicates the direction of the change and Step (1/2) would indicate its magnitude. In this sense, any given lexical tone (with Polarity and Step features) is projected on the intonational Register plane, post-lexically.

Convened by the ΔiaLing and BantUGent research groups, Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Augsburg University) will present a talk titled “Towards a better understanding of Creoles through their comparison with fossilized learner varieties. The case of Palenquero Creole and Cabindan Portuguese”. This event is part of an Erasmus+ exchange.

Both Palenquero –a Spanish-lexified Creole spoken in the small village of San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia)– and the ‘partially restructured’ varieties of Portuguese spoken in the province of Cabinda (Angola) share the same ‘substrate’: some western varieties belonging to the Kikongo Language Cluster: cp. Schryver/Grollemund/Branford/Bostoen 2015 and Bostoen/Schryver 2018).

Thus, getting to know the structural similarities and differences between Palenquero and Cabindan Portuguese turns out to be extraordinarily helpful for the study of creolization, since it enables us to set quantitative and/or qualitative limits between the process of creolization and the fossilization of interlanguages (Selinker 1972), especially as regards the role of the substrate in the two possible outcomes (cf. Winford 2008; see Gutiérrez Maté 2020 for the particular case of the two languages compared here).

The ultimate goal of this talk is determining the different historical, sociological and attitudinal processes (i.e. the different ecologies) that account for the birth of a Creole, in one case, and a non-Creole, in the other, out of a very similar combination of contributing languages (Kikongo substrate and Ibero-Romance superstrate).

The data have been collected by the author in situ as a result of his fieldwork in Palenque (2017, 2018) and Cabinda (2019, 2020). In addition, for the case of Palenquero, the author also uses the interviews made by A. Schwegler during his first stays in the village (1985-1988), which reveal themselves as extraordinarily helpful for containing large language samples of so-called Traditional Palenquero (see Lipski 2020 about bilingualism in the village and other non- -traditional varieties of Palenquero).

Bibliography

Bostoen, Koen / Gilles-Maurice de Schryver. 2018. Seventeenth-century Kikongo is not the ancestor of present-day Kikongo. In K. Bostoen & I. Brinkman (eds.), The Kongo kingdom: the origins, dynamics and cosmopolitan culture of an African polity (pp. 60–102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gutiérrez Maté, Miguel. 2020. De Palenque a Cabinda: un paso necesario para los estudios afroiberorrománicos y criollos. Gabriele Knauer, Alexandra Ortiz Wallner & Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (eds.), Mundos caribeños – Caribbean Worlds – Mondes Caribéens. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 105-138.

Lipski, John M. 2020. Palenquero and Spanish in Contact: Exploring the interface. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Schryver, Gilles-Maurice / Grollemund, Rebecca /Branford, Simon /Bostoen, Koen. 2015. Introducing a state‑of‑the‑art phylogenetic classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster. Africana Linguistica 21: 87-162

Schwegler, Armin. 2016. Combining Population Genetics with Historical Linguistics: On the African Origins of the Latin America Black and Mulatto Populations. In: Sessarego, Sandro/Tejedo, Fernando (eds.): Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Selinker, Larry. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 10(3). 209–241.

Winford, Donald. 2008. Processes of Creole formation and related contact-induced language change. Journal of Language Contact 2/1. 124-145

Contact:

Sifra Van Acker (sifra.vanacker@ugent.be)

Lorenzo Maselli (lorenzo.maselli@ugent.be)

Heidi Goes talked about her research on the Kikongo Language Cluster and her fieldwork in Cabinda on June 20, 2021, as part of a lecture series organized by the Australian Esperanto Association. Her talk is available on Youtube.