Koen Bostoen – BantUGent – UGent Centre for Bantu Studies

Lis Kerr gives talk with Bernat Bardagil at Diachronic Generative Syntax workshop in Oxford

Lis Kerr gave a talk with Bernat Bardagil (UGent) at the 26th Diachronic Generative Syntax (DIGS) conference held from June 23rd – 26th at the University of Oxford. The talk was titled “Reconstructing changes in verbal synthesis without written records” and was part of a workshop dedicated to methods and theory for investigating historical syntax with less-documented and unwritten languages.

Several BantUGent talks at the SocioBaGS workshop (June 26-28) in Aix-en-Provence

The ANR-DFG SocioBaGs project investigates variation and change in the nominal classification systems of the Bantu languages. During a three-day workshop (June 26-28, 2026) at the Laboratoire Parole et langage (CNRS) of the University of Aix-Marseille, members of the SocioBaGS scientific committee as well as researchers from outside the project core team gathered to exchange ideas and findings on the latest research about the typology of Bantu and non-Bantu nominal classification systems and the population history and contact dynamics of sub-Saharan Africa.

BantUGent was well represented with team members being involved in four different talks.

Koen Bostoen, Jean-Pierre Donzo Bunza Yugia and Sara Pacchiarotti. The historical impact of Ubangi language shifters on Bantu gender systems:
the case of Ngombe (Bantu, C41).
Sara Pacchiarotti, Paulin Baraka Bose and Koen Bostoen. The gender system of Gezon, a poorly known variety of Pagibete (Bantu C401).
Rasmus Bernander, Antti Laine and Nina van der Vlugt. On the status of Bantu class 19 in Eastern Bantu.
Hilde Gunnink. Noun class assignment of loanwords in Bantu: comparing European and African donor language.

The workshop’s entire program is available here.

Nina van der Vlugt talks on Shona diminutives in Gothenburg

On 5 June, Nina van der Vlugt gave a presentation for the Linguistic Structures’ seminar series organized by the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg titled “A diachronic typology of diminutives in Shona varieties“.`

Lis Kerr gives talk at Göttingen Language Fieldwork workshop

On 2^nd June Lis Kerr gave a keynote talk on linguistic fieldwork methods at the Language Fieldwork workshop organised for BA/MA/PhD students at Georg-Augustus-Universität Göttingen.

Hilde Gunnink features in the TV show “Campus Cup”

Hilde Gunnink (BantUGent – ULeiden) featured in the VRT CANVAS TV show “Campus Cup” as a visiting professor holding a short “African Studies” exam. Watch it here from minute 28 onwards.

Several BantUGent talks at the Comparative Niger-Congo Workshop, LLACAN, Paris

You are warmly invited to attend the upcoming Comparative Niger-Congo Workshop, taking place on Thursday 22 – Friday 23 May 2025, both in person at CNRS-LLACAN in Paris/Villejuif and online via Zoom. The workshop is free to attend online, but registration is required. You can explore the full programme and abstracts, and register for online attendance here.

Lis Kerr gives talk on Bantu languages and generative syntactic theory at Minho workshop

On May 8th-9th 2025, the University of Minho, Portugal organised the 1^st Workshop on Endangered and Minoritized Languages. The workshop took place online, with four thematic panels bringing together international researchers working on endangered and minoritized languages. Lis Kerr from BantUGent gave a talk in the panel on The study of minoritized languages and their impact on modern Linguistic Theory, entitled “The impact of Bantu languages on generative syntactic theory”.

Maud Devos geeft een lezing over het Swahili voor de gemeente Tervuren

Op zondag 27 april van 10u tot 12u geeft Maud Devos (KMMA/BantUGent) een openbare lezing over het Swahili op uitnodiging van de gemeente Tervuren.

Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen talk at Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF 2025)

On April 18-19, 2025, the fourth meeting of the Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF 2025) took place at Princeton University (New Jersey, USA). The theme for PɸF 2025 was Sound Patterns and Human History. The workshop brought together scholars whose research examines the connection between human history, events, and migration (as evidenced from oral history, archeology, genetics, etc.) and large-scale areal zones of sound system convergence. BantUGent was present with two talks:

BantUGent authors rebut recent Nature Human Behaviour paper on Central African hunter-gatherers

In a rebuttal to the Padilla-Iglesias et al. (2024) paper published in the Nature Human Behaviour journal, the BantUGent scholars Hilde Gunnink, Sara Pacchiarotti, Guy Kouarata, Paulin Baraka Bose and Koen Bostoen refute the claim that ten Central African Hunter-Gatherer communities share a history of genetic, cultural, and linguistic evolution, that started many millennia before the first food producers settled in the Congo basin. Padilla-Iglesias et al. (2024) base this claim on comparative evidence from musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide data. Hilde Gunnink and colleagues consider the linguistic evidence for this hypothesis unsubstantiated because (1) the historical-linguistic methodology of Padilla-Iglesias et al. (2024) is flawed, and (2) much relevant data were overlooked. As Nature Human Behaviour has not published yet their rebuttal titled “Central African Hunter-Gatherer Music Lexicon Does Not Predate the Bantu Expansion” (submitted on June 26, 2024), Hilde Gunnink and colleagues published a pre-print on SocArXiv, the open archive of the social sciences.