Author: Koen Bostoen

A first version of the program for the Linguists’ Day of the Linguistic Society of Belgium on 22 October 2021 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has been drafted. You can find a copy in the attachment. One of the opening talks is on “Phonetic documentation in the  underexplored linguistic  landscape of the Mai–Ndombe  Province of the Democratic  Republic of the Congo” by Lorenzo Maselli, Jean–Pierre  Donzo, Sara Pacchiarotti and  Koen Bostoen from BantUGent

 

If you would like to attend, you can do so free of charge, even without being a member. Registration is possible through this form. Deadline for registration is 30 September 2021. Registration is compulsory, but free of charge and sanitary measures allowing, the conference will be organised on campus. If Covid measures prevent a live event, the entire conference will be moved online.

For more information check here.

On October 7, 2021, Hannah Gibson and Jenneke van der Wal organise an online workshop exploring the expression of mirativity and evidentiality in Bantu languages with research from amongst other Deo Kawalya (University of Makerere – BantUGent) & Maud Devos (RMCA – BantUGent).

Please contact Hannah Gibson (h.gibson@essex.ac.uk) or Jenneke van der Wal (g.j.van.der.wal@hum.leidenuniv.nl) if you are interested. They will send you the Zoom link!

 

13:00	Start and welcome	Hannah Gibson and Jenneke van der Wal
13:10-13:40	A corpus-driven analysis of the Luganda near-synonym evidential particles mbu and nti	Deo Kawalya
13:40-14:10	Looking for evidentiality in Bantu	Thera Crane
14:10-14:40	Mirativity in Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili	Claudius Kihara
14:40-15:00	BREAK
15:00-15:30	The expression of miratives in Rukiga	Allen Asiimwe
15:30-16:00	On the possibility of a mirative enclitic in Shangaji	Maud Devos
16:00-16:30	Post-verbal clitics and mirativity in Bemba	Nancy Kula, Hannah Gibson and Kyle Jerro
16:30-17:00	BREAK
17:00-17:30	Possible evidentiality in Copi	Melle Groen
17:30-18:00	Evidentiality Contrasts and TAM Marking in Bamiléké-Dschang: A Case of Double Duty	Matthew N. Czuba
18:00-18:30	Emphatic interpretations of Object Marking	Hannah Lippard, Justine Sikuku, Crisófia Langa da Camara, and Michael Diercks

On September 7, 2021, Koen Bostoen gave a short online master class on the Bantu Expansion in the precolonial African History course of Prof. Mohammed Bashir Salau and Drs. Matthew Lempke at the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History of the University of Mississippi (USA).

As the President of Euralex, the European Association for Lexicography, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent) attends and chairs several events at the virtual Euralex XIX congress,  which is organized by the Democritus University of Thrace in Alexandroupoli, Greece (7-9 September 2021).

 

Peter Coutros (BantUGent) and Igor Matonda (UNIKIN) left early August for a 6-week archaeological fieldwork mission along the Kwilu-Kasai-Loange river network (DRC) as part of the BantuFirst project.

From April 16 to June 16, 2021, Guy Kouarata carried out a BantuFirst fieldwork in the territories of Mbandaka, Maluku, Kwamouth, and Kinshasa of the DRC and in the area north of Brazzaville in Congo. For a short blog post, click here.

Lorenzo Maselli went on a multidisciplinary fieldwork mission in the Mai Ndombe Province of the DRC together with Prof. Jean-Pierre Donzo (ISP Gombe) as part of the BantuFirst project.

Manoah-Joël Misago (Université du Burundi – BantUGent) and colleagues publish a new study on Kirundi in the journal Language in Africa using the BantUGent Kirundi corpus.

Koen Bostoen presented a talk titled “Retrieving lost paths in the rainforest after population collapse in Congo rainforest from 400 CE” at the online ASCL Seminar in Leiden on June 17, 2021, at 3.30 pm.