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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.

On November 7, 2025, Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) gave a talk titled “Reprobing the deep past of  the languages, peoples, cultures and environments  in the Kwilu-Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo” at the African languages colloquium of the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf.

is Kerr gave an invited talk at a workshop on Tunen language and indigenous law held from 23^rd – 24^th October at Bayreuth University, speaking on “The Tunen language: Classification and key characteristics”. The workshop was organised as part of the postdoctoral research of Endurence Dissake on language use within customary court proceedings of the Banen of Cameroon.

Participants (Photo: Anna Maria Fehn)

Heidi Goes during Q&A (Photo: Miguel Guttiérez Maté)

• Elisabeth Kerr: ‘Optional’ vowel harmony and the phonological word. (CALL54)
• Nina van der Vlugt: A diachronic typology of diminutives in Shona varieties. (CALL54)
• Elisabeth Kerr: Mbam wordhood and Niger-Congo morphosyntactic reconstruction. (SLE58)
• Maud Devos, Rasmus Bernander, and Jacky Maniacky: Bantu connective negation in the shadow of main clause negation (SLE58)