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

This talk explores historical and geographical dynamism of what is referred to as Inland Swahili (Kiswahili cha bara) through multi-dimensional investigation into the historical development of the relative pronoun ‑enye. This morpheme, identified as an adnominal possessive marker meaning ‘having’ in the Standard Swahili whose grammatical basis is traced back to the coastal variety Kiunguja, has evolved into a relative pronoun in contemporary varieties of Kenyan Colloquial Swahili (KCS). However, this grammatical change may not be explained as a straight-forward language-internal functional shift from possessives (POSS) to relatives (REL), since such a direct process of grammaticalisation is hardly proved in languages with POSS-REL uniformity cross-linguistically (cf. Hendrey 2012), despite the functional continuity between them being linguistically well motivated (cf. Aristar 1991).

Given this, an alternative historical pathway is likely to account for the origin and the developmental process of -enye as a relativiser, which itself is widely attested in many lingua-franca varieties spoken in vast areas of eastern DRC. Drawn on diverse data including linguistic descriptions and historical documents, this talk proposes a plausible historical scenario for its origin and traces the route through which it was eventually introduced into KCS. This investigation thus sheds new light on an as-yet unexplored dimension of the historical dynamism of the largest macro-language spanning vast regions of East and Central Africa.