Congratulations to Lis Kerr (BantUGent, MBAM project) for receiving a small grant from the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) to make the first audio recordings of Átɔmb (Tuotomb, ISO 639-3 ttf), an endangered Mbam Bantu language spoken by <300 people in central Cameroon. The project aims to lay the foundations for further work on a community dictionary and grammar sketch. The project was set in motion with a successful first visit to the Boneck village in March 2025, as pictured.
During her ongoing fieldwork in Ndikiniméki (Cameroon), our post-doc Lis Kerr took time to travel to Yaoundé to give a talk for masters / PhD students and staff at the Department of African Languages and Linguistics of the University of Yaoundé 1. She talked on the topic of OV/VO word order in Cameroonian Bantu/Bantoid languages.
Upon invitation of the Eekhout Academy, Koen Bostoen offered training on ancient Central African history, more specifically the Bantu Expansion, to secondary school history teachers. The workshop took place at KULAK in Kortrijk on Thursday February 6, 2025.
On February 5, 2025, between 2pm and 4pm, Maud Devos (RMCA-BantUGent) talks at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains (LAMC) Brussels University (ULB) on the colonial Tetela archives of the former UGent professor John Jacobs. Her talk is titled “”Les archives Tetela du linguiste colonial Belge John Jacobs: perspectives historiques et contemporains“.
From November 4 to 8 the 2024 World Neolithic Congress in Şanlıurfa (Türkiye) united specialists from around the world to discuss diverse Neolithic formations that took place across different geographical locations in different time-frames following diverse cultural and socio-economic trajectories. BantUGent was also present. Koen Bostoen was invited to talk on the Bantu Expansion in a panel titled “Foraging to Food Production and The Consequences: A Global Review” organized by Peter Bellwood and Hsiao-Chun Hung. He presented a joint talk with Peter Coutros & Jessamy Doman on the “The Bantu Expansion and low-level food production in Central Africa“, which combined a review of existent research with recent insights from the BantuFirst project in the Kwilu-Kasai area of the DRC.
In a two-day workshop at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at UGent, Dr. Andrew Harvey (University of Bayreuth) taught a course about how to make the most out of ELAN and FLEx. These two powerful softwares are essential for linguists that work with audio-visual data and allow users to annotate, analyze and process spoken data. Here you can read more about the workshop organized by Nina van der Vlugt, Bernat Bardagil Mas and Sara Pacchiarotti. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the UGent Doctoral School and the Flemish Government.
Hilde Gunnink (BantUGent – Leiden University) was interviewed on her research on Southern African click languages by Mathilde Jansen for the Nemo Science Museum in Amsterdam. The interview can be read and listen to here.
Two PhD candidates in the BaSIS project (Leiden University) led by Prof. Jenneke van der Wal have finished their PhD theses! Their public defence ceremonies are scheduled as follows:
In honour of their achievements, there was an informal workshop on Wednesday 4th September on syntax, information structure, and Bantu languages, during which Koen Bostoen (member of PhD jury Zhen Li) presented a talk on Kukuya titled “The genealogy and contact history of Kukuya (Bantu, B77a) and its closest Teke relatives: new insights from diachronic phonology”.
On August 29th Peter Coutros (CongUbangi), Igor Matonda (UNIKIN), Henri Zana (CongUbangi), Lucien Pierre Nguerede (CongUbangi) and Sara Pacchiarotti (CongUbangi) presented their research on “Central African archaeology of the northern Bantu borderlands: Initial Results of the CongUbangi research project” at the annual European Association of Archaeologists conference in Rome. The presentation was in The Archaeology of Ancient Borderscapes: Multiple Approaches, New Paradigms session and focused on the results from the team’s recent archaeological and ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Sub-Ubangi province DRC. The preliminary results revolved around:
At the 53rd Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics in Leiden (August 26-28), Hilde Gunnink and Nina van der Vlugt (BantUGent) presented their collaborative research in the joint talk titled “The development of lateral obstruents in Southern Bantu: A comparative diachronic study“.
