Previous activities

 

On May 20, 2022 Prof. Jeroen Dewulf, Professor at the UC Berkeley Department of German & Dutch Studies and also active in the fields of African Studies and Latin American Studies, visits BantUGent for a public talk. Title and abstract below. A recording of the talk is available here.

Flying Back to Africa or Flying to Heaven? Competing Visions of Afterlife in the Lowcountry and Caribbean Slave Societies

This study presents a new interpretation of the famous folktale about enslaved Africans flying home, including the legend that only those who refrained from eating salt could fly back to Africa. It rejects claims that the tale is rooted in Igbo culture and relates to suicide as a desperate attempt to escape from slavery. Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa. It relates objections to eating salt to the Kikongo expression curia mungua "to eat salt", meaning baptism, and claims that the tale originated in the context of discussions among the enslaved about the consequences of a Christian baptism for one’s spiritual afterlife.

 

 

 

On April 22, 2022 (2pm CET), Michel Onokoko (BantUGent) defends his PhD dissertation titled "Éléments de description de la phonologie et de la morphologie du cíbìnjì cyà ngúsú, langue bantoue (L231) du Kasaï Central, R.D. Congo”, which he wrote under the co-supervision of Prof. Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) and Prof. Joseph Koni Muluwa (ISP Kikwit - BantUGent). The jury members are Prof. Timotee Mukash Kalel (Université de Kinshasa), Prof. Maud Devos (Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren & UGent), Dr. Rozenn Guérois (LLACAN, CNRS, Paris), and Dr. Guy Kouarata (UGent).  The president of the jury is Prof. Jo Van Steenbergen (UGent) and the secretary Prof. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (UGent).

This event can also be followed online through MS Teams. More info: koen.bostoen@ugent.be

The ceremony will be followed by a reception (near the Faculty Council, Blandijnberg 2, first floor)

 

Le 22 avril 2022 (14h00 CET), Michel Onokoko (BantUGent) soutient sa thèse intitulée "Éléments de description de la phonologie et de la morphologie du cíbìnjì cyà ngúsú, langue bantoue (L231) du Kasaï Central, R. D. Congo", qu'il a rédigée sous la co-direction du Prof. Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) et du Prof. Joseph Koni Muluwa (ISP Kikwit - BantUGent). Les membres du jury sont le Prof. Timotee Mukash Kalel (Université de Kinshasa), la Prof. Maud Devos (Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale, Tervuren & UGent), la Dr. Rozenn Guérois (LLACAN, CNRS, Paris) et le Dr. Guy Kouarata (UGent). Le président du jury est le Prof. Jo Van Steenbergen (UGent) et le secrétaire le Prof. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (UGent).

Cet événement peut également être suivi en ligne via MS Teams. Plus d'informations : koen.bostoen@ugent.be

La cérémonie sera suivie d'une réception (près du Conseil de la Faculté, Blandijnberg 2, premier étage).

This talk examines the art of the Rwandan kingdom in the Great Lakes Region of eastern Africa, investigating how environmental and political conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including encounters with European missionaries and colonial powers, shaped artistic creativity in Rwanda. Ultimately, the talk will consider the following questions: How was the image of the kingdom transformed by Rwandese artists? What can material objects reveal about Rwanda’s heritage and state formation? How and why did artwork impact Rwandan and European perceptions of the kingdom more broadly? The talk draws, in part, from images and objects held in the archives and collections of the Smithsonian Institution, including photographs and films taken by White Fathers missionaries in Rwanda. Through object-based examinations and archival research, this talk examines how Rwandese artists rendered images of power and prosperity through works depicting cattle and reflecting surrounding landscapes that shaped both Rwandan and European notions of the kingdom.

Talia Lieber is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she specializes in the arts of the African continent. Originally from Washington, D.C., Talia earned her M.A. degree in Art History from UCLA (2019) and her B.A. in International Relations and Art History from Tufts University (2013). Her dissertation research on the art of Rwanda has been generously supported by the Smithsonian Institution, the Fulbright Program, and UCLA. She has assisted with African art exhibitions at the National Museum of African Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and served as Co-Editor-In-Chief of Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies. 

On April 1, 2022 (9.30 am CET), Heidi Goes (BantUGent) defends her PhD dissertation titled "A historical-comparative approach to phonological and morphological variation in the Kikongo Language Cluster, with a special focus on Cabinda”, which she wrote under the co-supervision of Prof. Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) and Prof. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent). The jury members are Prof. Bruce Connell (York University), Prof. Nobuko Yoneda (Osaka University), Prof. Joseph Koni Muluwa (ISP Kikwit), Prof. Mark Janse (UGent) and Dr. Guy Kouarata (UGent).  The president of the jury is Prof. Jo Van Steenbergen (UGent) and the secretary Dr. Hilde Gunnink (UGent).

This event can also be followed online through MS Teams. More info: heidi.goes@ugent.be

The ceremony will be followed by a reception (near the Faculty Council, Blandijnberg 2, first floor)

Please confirm your presence using this link (https://webappsx.ugent.be/eventManager/events/cabinda), at the latest  Wednesday at noon (23/3/2022).

 

 

 

On April 1, 2022, Bruna da Silva (BantUGent) defends her PhD dissertation titled "Specialised Digital Frame-Based Lexicography from the Perspective of Dictionary Use Research”, which she wrote under the co-supervision of Prof. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent) and Rove Luiza de Oliveira Chishman (Vale do Rio dos Sinos University, Brazil). The jury members are Dr. Tanara Zingano Kuhn (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Prof. Larissa Moreira Brangel (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), Prof. Timothy Colleman (Ghent University, Belgium), and Prof. Sandro José Rigo (UNISINOS University, Brazil).

This event takes place via video-conferencing, with Teams.

 

 

Angi Ngumbu (The Seed Company) visits BantUGent on Wednesday March 23 and will give a talk titled "Applied Linguistics: Stories of how linguistics is impacting the lives of the speakers of minority languages in DRC"

 

Angi Ngumbu has been working as a linguist and project manager in the two Congos (Brazzaville and Kinshasa) for 15 years.  She will share about the different projects she has worked on during this time in applied linguistics, from picture dictionaries, language documentation, survey, and orthography development.  Some of this work has been directly influenced by or done in collaboration with personnel from Ghent University.

 

Venue: Simon Stevin Room

Contact: koen.bostoen@ugent.be

 

2 Workshops with choreographer Harold George in de Vooruit. Contact Amber.Frateur@UGent.befor information

A dance rehearsal/debate: with Harold George, Dunia Dance Theatre & AfriKeraArts

Registration:https://webappsx.ugent.be/eventManager/events/DANCEREHEARSAL

 

 

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.

On May 26, 2021, BantUGent and the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in Tokyo (Japan) have the second kick-off meeting of their FWO-JSPS-funded collaborative project on “The Past and Present of Bantu Languages: Integrating Micro-Typology, Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Lexicography“. It also covers BantuFirst research.

 

9:30-9:40: Opening remarks

 

9:45-11:15: The first session

9:45-10:15 Koen Bostoen: “Suffixal phrasemes in Bantu verbal derivation”

10:15-10:45 Nobuko Yoneda: “Properties of the subject in Bantu languages”

10:45-11:15 Minah Nabirye: “Information Structure in Lusoga: New Corpus-based Research”

 

11:15-11:30 Coffee

 

11:30-13:00: The second session

11:30-12:00 Daisuke Shinagawa: “Morphosyntactic local variation in Chaga”

12:00-12:30 Gilles-Maurice de Schryver: “Bantu lexicography in Asia”

12:30-13:00 General discussion about the project’s research agenda

 

On May 12, 2021, BantUGent and the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in Tokyo (Japan) have the first kick-off meeting of their FWO-JSPS-funded collaborative project on "The Past and Present of Bantu Languages: Integrating Micro-Typology, Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Lexicography". It also covers BantuFirst research.

 

The meeting is online.  The Zoom link to participate can be obtained via koen.bostoen@ugent.be upon request.

 

9:30-9:40: Opening remarks

 

9:45-11:15: The first session

9:45-10:15 Sara Pacchiarotti: "Phylogenetics and the Comparative Method as tools for the internal classification of West-Coastal Bantu: results and challenges”

10:15-10:45 Lorenzo Maselli: "Phonetic and phonological research on hunter-gatherer substrate interference in the West-Coastal Bantu homeland region: some preliminary results and methodological remarks"

10:45-11:15 Kyoungwon Jeong: "Micro-parametric research on cross-Bantu phonological microvariation: a test case in Swati"

 

11:15-11:30 Coffee

 

11:30-13:00: The second session

11:30-12:00 Yuka Makino: "Contrastive analysis on the local variation of TAM expressions in M40 and M50"

12:00-12:30 Makoto Furumoto: "A synchronic and diachronic analysis of the Kimakunduchi final vowel"

12:30-13:00 Hilde Gunnink: "Language contact between migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers in southern Africa"

 

• Webpage: https://www.bantugent.ugent.be/events/orpbgconference/
• Organisation: the UGent Centre for Bantu Studies (BantUGent) and the RMCA Service of Culture & Society (Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren)
• Funding: Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), the UGent Faculty of Arts and Philosophy and the RMCA.
• Dates: November 19-23, 2018
• Venue: Ghent University, Campus Boekentoren/Book Tower
• Contact: If you would like to contact any of the presenters, click on their name below.
• Click here for a photo report of the conference by Gilles-Maurice de Schryver and his team

Program

MONDAY NOVEMBER 19, 2018

Venue: Jozef Plateauzaal (Jozef Plateaustraat 22)

Opening

08.30: Welcome + Registration

09.15: Opening address by the organizing committee (Koen Bostoen)

Chair: Koen Bostoen

09.30: Thilo Schadeberg (Leiden University) Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar Half a Century after Meeussen (1967)

10.15: Rebecca Grollemund (University of Missouri) and Lutz Marten (SOAS) Reconstructing Proto-Bantu in the Light of the Latest Insights into Bantu Phylogeny

11.00: Coffee break

Proto-Bantu Phonology

Chair: Rozenn Guérois

11.30: Nancy Kula (University of Essex) Proto-Bantu Segmental Phonology

12.15: Gérard Philippson (DDL, Lyon) ‘Double Reflexes’ Revisited: Implications for the Proto-Bantu Consonant System

13.00: Lunch break

14.00: Lotta Aunio (University of Helsinki) & Jacky Maniacky (RMCA, Tervuren) Proto-Bantu Nominal Tone

14.45: Michael Marlo (University of Missouri) Proto-Bantu Verbal Tone

15.30: Larry Hyman (University of California, Berkeley) Causative and Passive H tone: Spurious or Proto?

16.15: Coffee break

16.45: Round table discussion (Council Room Faculty Arts & Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 1st floor)

18.00: Closure

 

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 20, 2018

Venue: Jozef Plateauzaal (Jozef Plateaustraat 22)

Chair: Gilles-Maurice de Schryver

Proto-Bantu Verbal Form

09.30: Jeff Good (University at Buffalo) & Tom Güldemann (Humboldt University of Berlin) Proto-Bantu Verbal Form 

Proto-Bantu Verbal Derivation

10.15: Roger Blench (Kay Williamson Educational Foundation) Proto-Bantu Verbal Extensions from a Bantoid Perspective

11.00: Coffee break

11.30: Sara Pacchiarotti (Ghent University) On the reconstructable main clause functions of Proto-Bantu applicative suffix *-ɪd

12.15: Rozenn Guérois (Ghent University) Proto-Bantu Passive Constructions

13.00: Lunch Break

14.00: Sebastian Dom (Ghent University) & Leonid Kulikov (Ghent University) Proto-Bantu Middle Voice: From Meeussen to Schadeberg and Beyond

14.45: Koen Bostoen (Ghent University) Non-Compositional Complex Verbal Derivation Suffixes and the Semantic Reconstruction of *-an in Proto-Bantu

15.30: Coffee Break

16.00: Round table discussion (Council Room Faculty Arts & Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 1st floor)

17.15: Proto-Bantu QUIZ (Sara Pacchiarotti & Koen Bostoen)

18.00: Closure

 

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 21, 2018

Excursion to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren

Venue: CODA building, room 333, Leuvensesteenweg 17, 3080 Tervuren

08.15: Departure to Tervuren by bus (in front of main entrance Plateau building, Jozef Plateaustraat 22)

Welcome

10.15: Welcome address at the RMCA

Chair: Sebastian Dom

10.30: Maud Devos (RMCA, Tervuren) Recent Research on the Biography of Achiel Emiel Meeussen in Relation to Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967)

11.15: Coffee break

Proto-Bantu Tense, Aspect and Polarity

11.30: Derek Nurse (Independent Scholar) Proto-Bantu Tense and Aspect

12.15: John Watters (SIL International) Proto-Bantu Tense from a Benue-Congo Perspective

13.00: Lunch break

14.00: Thera Crane (University of Helsinki) & Bastian Persohn (University of Hamburg) Proto-Bantu Lexical Aspect

14.45:  Coffee break

15.00: Round table discussion

16:15: Guided pre-view and visit of the renovated Royal Museum for Central Africa

18.15: Back to Ghent

 

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 22, 2018

Venue: Council Room Faculty Arts & Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 1st floor

Proto-Bantu Verbal Morphosyntax

Chair: Sara Pacchiarotti

09.00: Mark Van de Velde (LLACAN, Paris) Proto-Bantu Relative Clauses

09.45: Hannah Gibson (University of Essex) Proto-Bantu Auxiliary Constructions

10.30: Coffee break

11.00: Rasmus Bernander (University of Helsinki) & Maud Devos (RMCA, Tervuren): Proto-Bantu Existentials 

Proto-Bantu Clausal Syntax and Information Structure

Chair: Hilde Gunnink

11.45: Benji Wald (University of California, Berkeley) Some Problems in the Information Structure of Proto-Bantu (& its descendants)

12.30: Lunch break

13.30: Fatima Hamlaoui (University of Toronto) Proto-Bantu Word Order

14.15: Yukiko Morimoto (Humboldt University of Berlin) & Nobuko Yoneda (Osaka University) Proto-Bantu Subject and Topic

15.00: Jenneke van der Wal (Leiden University) Proto-Bantu Focus Constructions

15.45: Coffee break

16.15: Round table discussion

17.30: Closure

19.00: Conference Dinner (La Cave, Emile Braunplein 15)

 

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 23, 2018

Venue: Council Room Faculty Arts & Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 1st floor

Chair: Jacky Maniacky

Proto-Bantu Clausal Syntax and Information Structure (Continued)

09.00: Laura Downing (Gothenburg University) Prosodic Phrasing in Proto-Bantu

09.45: Tom Güldemann (Humboldt University of Berlin) Meeussen's (1967) 'advance verb construction' - what to reconstruct?

10.30: Dmitri Idiatov (LLACAN, Paris) Proto-Bantu Question Words

11.15: Coffee break

Proto-Bantu Nominal Morphosyntax

Chair: Maud Devos

11.45: Josephat M. Rugemalira (University of Dar es Salaam) Proto-Bantu Noun Phrase Structure

12.30: Lunch break

13.30: Jean Paul Ngoboka (University of Rwanda) Proto-Bantu Locatives

14.15: Jean-Georges Kamba Muzenga (Lubumbashi University) Proto-Bantu Substitutives and Possessives

15.00: Coffee break

Closure

15.30: Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (Ghent University) Bibliometrics in Bantu Lexical and Grammatical Reconstructions: A.E. Meeussen and Beyond

16.15: Round table discussion + round-up (proceedings, future meetings, online platform, etc.)

17.30: Closing words (Koen Bostoen)