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• CNRS-LLACAN seminar series: Verb stem variation in Cameroonian Bantoid
• CNRS-LLF LingLunch: Modelling disharmonic clausal word order in languages of West and Central Africa

Sara Pacchiarotti was invited as a keynote speaker at the second workshop of the DFG-funded project Applicative Alternations Across Languages which took place at the university of Cologne on February 19-20. She gave a talk titled “X, P ~X applicatives and their interaction with information structure in Eastern Bantu“. This talk showcased novel research by Bantu Gent members Ernest Nshemezina, Manoah Joel Misago (departed), and Koen Bostoen on the Bantu language Rundi.

Makerere University (in Kampala, Uganda) officially launched the teaching of Lusoga, marking a historic expansion of indigenous language scholarship during celebrations of International Mother Language Day 2026.

The launch was presided over by His Majesty William Gabula Nadiope IV, the Kyabazinga of Busoga.

Dr. Minah Nabirye (PhD in African languages & cultures) is a Musoga, was born in Busoga, is rooted in Kisoga, and her native language is Lusoga. De facto, Lusoga is an oral Bantu language spoken in the East of Uganda. Dr. Nabirye’s entire research career has been devoted to putting the Lusoga language, the Kisoga traditions, the history of the Busoga Kingdom, and the Basoga people themselves on the map.

She was a lexicographer during her MA dissertation, and as an aside she produced the first monolingual Lusoga dictionary (Eiwanika). She was a linguist during her PhD thesis, and as an aside she produced the first scientific grammar of the language (Manual for Teachers). During the initial phase of her postdoc she was a corpus builder, and as an aside she produced the first academic collection of oral transcriptions of spoken Lusoga (Owayanga).

Having completed the Boasian ‘dictionary-grammar-text’ trilogy for a single language, she fought to get Lusoga into the education system, from Primary, over Secondary, all the way to Tertiary. With the help of fellow Basoga like Dr. Gulere Cornelius (PhD in Lusoga literature and Kisoga culture) and Dr. Moses Wambi (PhD in Education Management), they provided the groundwork.

Let the Lusoga language now flourish at Makerere University!

Several BantUGent members presented their latest research on modality at the International Conference on Modality in Bantu: Variation & Change, which took place at Mkwawa University College of Education, in Iringa, Tanzania, on 20-21 February 2026.

BantUGent members gave the following talks:

• Maud Devos, Minah Nabirye & Gilles-Maurice de Schryver – The subjunctive in Swahili: Core deontic, peripheral epistemic, as well as non-modal(?) uses. Insights from the Historical Swahili Corpus 2.0
• Aron Zahran – Modality in the languages of the Lower Zambezi (N30-40, S10)
• Mary Zacharia Charwi & Rasmus Bernander – Swahili loans within the Kuria modal domain
• Deo Kawalya – Modality in Ugandan Bantu languages, and lessons for future researchers
• Ferdinand Mberamihigo – From main verb to modality in Kirundi (JD62)

An example:

The subjunctive in Swahili: Insights from the Historical Swahili Corpus 2.0

Team member Lorenzo Maselli is currently back in Central African Republic, continuing the fieldwork started last year as part of a broader postdoctoral research programme on phonetic and phonological microvariation in the Ubangi region. This new field mission builds directly on the 2025 campaign, during which Lorenzo collected a rich body of electroglottographic (EGG) and other articulatory data. The present stay focuses on extending and consolidating these recordings, with particular attention to tone in the Bantu language Mpiemo. A first set of results from this year’s EGG recordings will be presented later this year at the 11th International Conference on Bantu Languages (Bantu11). Together, these field campaigns aim to establish a robust empirical foundation for integrating phonetic evidence into historical and typological research on Central African languages.

We are delighted to share that Dr. Lorenzo Maselli has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Global Fellowship, one of the most competitive individual fellowships funded by the European Union. Lorenzo’s project, “NGBU – Non-explosion and Glottalisation in the Basin of the Ubangi”, was selected with an exceptional evaluation score of 97.4%, placing it among the very top-ranked proposals in this year’s call.

MSCA Global Fellowships support outstanding postdoctoral researchers and allow fellows to undertake advanced research and training through an international mobility scheme, involving an outgoing phase outside Europe and a return phase at a European host institution.

NGBU investigates the phonetic, phonological, and historical dynamics of glottalisation and non-explosion in speech, focusing on the languages of the Ubangi River Basin in Central Africa. The project combines: instrumental phonetics (acoustics, electroglottography, aerodynamics, static palatography),
phonological modelling, microvariationist typology, and historical-comparative reconstruction, integrated with insights from archaeology and population genetics.

During the outgoing phase, Lorenzo will be hosted at The Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, working under the supervision of Prof. Daisuke Shinagawa, a leading specialist in African linguistics and typological microvariation and long-standing friend of BantUGent.

The return phase will take place at Ghent University, within the BantUGent, under the supervision of Prof. Sara Pacchiarotti, whose ERC-funded “CongUbangi” project on the Congo-Ubangi region provides a strong interdisciplinary framework for the project’s diachronic component.

Congratulations to all parties involved in the project!

From January 15 to 31, Sara Pacchiarotti, PI of the ERC-funded CongUbangi project, visited the Central African Republic to meet with several authorities at Bangui University and the Ministery of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Technological Innovation. During her stay, Sara was interviewed about the CongUbangi project by Radio Ndeke Luka.  The interview was broadcasted locally and online on Sunday February 1 as part of the “Magazine de Culture”, broadcast “100% Culture”. For more info, check here.

In a recent series of articles Gilles-Maurice de Schryver focuses on three chatbots in the field of lexicography, and this for three languages from three markedly different language families:

• GPT-4o for Lusoga (Bantu, JE16)
• Gemini-2.5 for Portuguese (with a focus on the Brazilian variety)
• DeepSeek-R1 for Chinese (with the help of native speaker Wanjing Han)

Available from UGent Biblio as:

• Out-of-the-box GPTs for lexicography (for English, Portuguese, Swahili, Xhosa, Lusoga)
• Customised GPTs for lexicography (for Portuguese, Lusoga)
• DeepSeek as the ultimate translator and lexicographer (for Chinese)

On Saturday December 6, 2025, at 4pm CET, Peter Coutros and Koen Bostoen give an online talk titled “Re-probing the Past of the Kwilu–Kasai Region Half a Century after Jan Vansina” to the Kongo Academy.