BantUGent members Lis Kerr and Paulin Baraka Bose conducted research stays at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) research unit Langage, langues et cultures d’Afrique (Languages and cultures of Africa; LLACAN), in Paris/Villejuif.
Lis Kerr spent November 2025 – February 2026 as an invited researcher at LLACAN under a research mobility grant from the FWO, working on variation in Cameroonian Bantoid verb forms as part of her ongoing FWO-MBAM postdoctoral project. While in Paris she gave the following talks at CNRS:
-
CNRS-LLACAN seminar series: Verb stem variation in Cameroonian Bantoid
-
CNRS-LLF LingLunch: Modelling disharmonic clausal word order in languages of West and Central Africa
Paulin Baraka Bose visited LLACAN from 31 January to 15 February 2026 as part of his PhD research within the CongUbangi project. The main objective of his stay was to further develop his research on the morphosyntax of Fulu, a Sara-Bongo-Bagirmi (SBB) language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo(DRC), with particular attention to the structure of the verbal system.
During his stay, he collaborated with Pascal Boyeldieu, a leading specialist of Sara-Bongo-Bagirmi languages and author of the reference monograph on Bagiro spoken in the Central African Republic (CAR). This collaboration allowed him to place his analysis of Fulu in a broader comparative perspective, especially through comparison with closely related Bagiro varieties spoken in both the CAR and the DRC.
This research visit further strengthened the collaboration between BantUGent and LLACAN and contributed to ongoing efforts to better document and understand the linguistic diversity of the Central Sudanic language family.
