On Tuesday May 7, 2024, the start-up meeting for the RJ-funded project “Modality in Swahili – Variation, Change and Transfer” (P23-0101) took place at Gothenburg University. It was organized by Rasmus Bernander (Gothenburg University), together with Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent), Maud Devos (BantUGent), and Ponsiano Kanijo (University of Dar es Salaam). The program is available here.
From the project abstract:
Despite being a large, vibrant and socio-politically dominant language across the whole of East Africa, with a longstanding history of written records, several aspects of the Bantu language Swahili and its varieties have still not been coherently researched. One such under-explored area of the Swahili language is that of modality, viz. linguistic expressions such as can, must and perhaps that refer to the non-factual status of a proposition. This is surprising, not least since the Swahili modal system may offer important insights into contact-induced change, as many of its modals were originally borrowed and then spread to many other East African languages.
The aim of this project is to offer the first detailed and comprehensive account of expressions of modality in Swahili, focusing on the role of contact-induced variation and change through time and space. This will be accomplished through both corpus-driven research – to which end the world’s largest diachronic Swahili corpus will be developed – and comparative-typological work (including fieldwork) targeting East African languages that show Swahili influence in their modal systems.
Operationalizing the growing research interests in both Bantu modality and Swahili-related linguistic variation and change we address the broader questions on the socio-historical causes and cognitive constraints underpinning the trajectories of development within the domain of modality in Swahili and in the East African region.
