Revealing the Dynamism Behind Variation: Current Advancement of Swahili Variation Research in a Wider Context of Multilingual Ecology in Africa

Panel Convenor(s)

• DS

  Daisuke Shinagawa

  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan

Panel Chair(s)

• DS

  Daisuke Shinagawa

  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan

Presenter(s)

• DS

  Daisuke Shinagawa

  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan
• LM

  Lutz Marten

  SOAS University of London, United Kingdom
• CG

  Chege Githiora

  Kenyatta University, Kenya
• NN

  Nico Nassenstein

  Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

              This workshop aims to explore the linguistic diversity in contemporary varieties of Swahili and the dynamic mechanisms running behind it. As East Africa’s largest language of wider communication in terms of its geographical coverage as well as the number of speaker population, Swahili shows a tremendous range of diversity that reflect the historical routes and processes of spreading from the Coast to inland, through which the language underwent diversification through contact with languages from various phylogenetic background. Especially in the 20th century onward, rapid increase of people’s mobility through urbanisation brought about further varieties which may be defined in terms of different types of societal identities developed in the highly multilingual ecology characteristic in many African societies.

              The panelists of the proposed workshop has been intensively working on such linguistic diversity and diversification processes observed in a wide range of varieties of Swahili through several international joint research projects, resulting in notable publications that open the frontier of the field (see the selected list of references below). In this workshop, we will present the state of the art of this exciting field with particular focus on the following topics: i) Historical process of spreading and synchronic varieties in Congo Swahili, ii) Youth varieties in Nairobi, iii) Morphosyntactic variation across localised Swahili varieties, and iv) Morphosyntactic innovation in Kenyan Colloquial Swahili.

Selected references

Gibson, Hannah, Andrea Hollington, Nico Nassenstein and Colin Reilly (eds.) 2024. New perspectives on morphosyntactic variation in African youth language practices. The special issue in Linguistics Vanguard 10 (s4).

Gibson, Hannah, Chege Githiora, Fridah Kanana Erastus and Lutz Marten. 2024. Morphosyntactic retention and innovation in Sheng, a youth language or stylect of Kenya. Studies in Language 48(4).

Shinagawa, Daisuke, and Nico Nassenstein (eds.) 2019. Swahili forum 26 - Special issue: Variation in Swahili. ISSN: 1614-2373

Presentations:

• 09:00 - 10:45 GMT

  A Long and Winding Road to Nairobi: Proto-Bantu *-Jéné 'Self, Same' and the Emblematic Relative Pronoun in Kenyan Colloquial Swahili
  

  Presenter: Daisuke Shinagawa – Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
• 09:00 - 10:45 GMT

  Emerging Dialect Areas of Swahili: Evidence From Structural Variation, Speaker Perceptions and Language Attitudes
  

  Presenter: Lutz Marten – SOAS University of London
• 09:00 - 10:45 GMT

  Many paths lead into the forest: Historical spread and synchronic variation of Western Swahili (from 1850 to the present)
  

  Presenter: Nico Nassenstein – Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
• 09:00 - 10:45 GMT

  Variation in Sheng among Multilingual Preschool Children in Kenya
  

  Presenter: Chege John Githiora – Kenyatta University