Author: Koen Bostoen

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).

 

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.

Hilde Gunnink (BantUGent) has obtained a three-year senior postdoctoral grant from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) for a research project titled “Language contact and linguistic reconstruction: (pre)historic Bantu-Khoisan interactions in Southern Africa in a historical linguistic perspective“. It is a follow-up of her current FWO-funded junior postdoctoral project titled “Language contact between migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers in southern Africa” (2018-2022).

 

 

 

On June 4 at 4.30pm (CET) Inge Brinkman (BantUGent) gives an online talk titled “Formal Education Policies in the Kongo Kingdom of the 16th Century” for the Kongo Academy, a platform created in December 2019 by a group of intellectuals interested in promoting the Kongo culture through research, education and training, cultural events and partnerships with institutions and individuals interested in Kongo culture, history, and language. For more information on the event, including the Zoom link and passcode (738070), see here. The recording is available here (passcode: Na%.Y6wi).