We’re excited to announce a dynamic line-up of courses for the 2025 Seshegopuo Linguistics Winter School, presented by a range of national and international scholars who are leaders in their fields. Most courses will take place in person, with a few offered in hybrid format to allow broader participation. Whether you’re interested in syntax, phonology, corpus building, or regional language diversity, there’s something here to challenge and inspire.
Courses include:
Building and working with African Languge natural speech corpora (hybrid) (Eva-Marie Bloom Ström, Gothenburg & Kristina Riedel, Wits)
Experimental syntax (online) (Jana Willer-Gold, Oxford)
Introduction to the Kalahari Basin Area (online/hybrid) (Camilla Christie, UKZN)
Quantitative Research and Data Analysis for Linguists (Tracy Bowles, Rhodes)
Topics in Minimalist Syntax (Mark de Vos, Rhodes)
Topics in the Phonology of African Languages (Will Bennett, Rhodes & Aaron Braver, TTU)
Bantu verbal morphology and argument structure (Ron Simango, Rhodes)
The courses for the 2025 school will all be run via the Rhodes University Learning Management System (RUconnected). You will find links to each course on RUconnected and applicants will be enrolled. All announcements, course materials, etc. will be administered through the RUconnected portal.
You can find a list of courses and their descriptions at this link.
Most statistics courses are focussed on particular types of subjectsd and are not always very useful for the kinds of things that linguists study. This blended course is designed with linguists in mind. It will introduce you to the fundamentals of quantitative research design and statistical analysis in Linguistics. Combining self-paced study with daily one-hour in-person class sessions, you will be introduced to core concepts in quantitative research, including data types, descriptive statistics, and statistical testing using Jamovi. The course is practical and applied, focusing on linguistic data and offering step-by-step support in performing, interpreting, and reporting statistical analyses. You will work through foundational concepts independently, while the in-person class sessions will be dedicated to hands-on activities, discussion, and support.
By the end of the course, you should be able to:
Outline the key steps and decisions in quantitative data analysis of linguistic data
Explain common statistical concepts (e.g., mean, standard deviation, correlation, types of data)
Select and perform appropriate statistical tests using Jamovi (e.g., t-tests, ANOVA, regression)
Interpret and report statistical findings clearly
Create and interpret graphical representations of data
Please note: You will need to bring your own laptop (not a tablet) with you to participate fully in the course activities.
This course offers a hands-on introduction to key concepts in Minimalist Syntax, tailored to the background and interests of participants. It assumes a basic familiarity with undergraduate-level morphology and syntax but is designed to be accessible to those new to Minimalist theory.
We’ll cover the foundational architecture of syntax within the Minimalist Program: what Minimalism is, how syntactic structures are generated, and how core operations like MERGE, MOVE, and AGREE shape syntactic derivations. Topics include tree structure, feature checking, locality, and the role of syntactic features in triggering movement. Depending on the level and interests of the group, we may explore more advanced issues such as Phase Theory, the Labeling Algorithm, or cross-linguistic variation in feature systems.
By the end of the course, all students should be able to analyse basic sentence structures, form hypotheses about their underlying syntax, and apply standard tests to evaluate those hypotheses. Beginners are welcome, and more experienced students will be supported in pursuing specific areas of interest.
In this course we will focus on how you can collect - and work with - natural speech data as a basis for linguistic analysis of African languages. Firstly, we will discuss best practices and lessons learned when it comes to the recording set-up and prompts used to start a conversation. You will learn about genre types, ethics, and how to handle the observer’s paradox. Practical moments include working in groups with meta-data; what kind of data do you need, what are the challenges?
We will cover how to process the recordings in terms of data management, transcription and translation with ELAN and how to do non-time-aligned transcriptions using text files or spreadsheets. we discuss further processing of the data in terms of segmentation, interlinear glossing and corpus development
You will need to prepare independently by making a short recording, and work practically with transcription during the in-person class sessions.
This course aims to teach students how to do research on a few different types of topics in the phonologies of southern African languages. The core themes are (i) how to identify specific and answerable empirical questions, (ii) how to identify and collect relevant new data, and (iii) the basics of how to analyze data of various types. Each day will challenge students to conduct small scale experiments or analyses intended to be generalizable to languages the students speak. By the end of the short course, students should understand how to design, plan, and conduct simple data-driven research projects on South African languages. The tentative schedule is roughly as follows:
M: introduction to laboratory phonology
T: Optimality Theory and Typology
W: Praat and simple acoustic measurements
θ: Perception and production experiments
F: Wrap up: labial palatalization
Each day will have a homework assignment to do for the following class.
Experimental Syntax: The course will introduce students to the experimental syntax – why should we do it? with its standard practice of disentangling empirical claims using acceptability judgments and factorial design. Taking agreement as a test case, we will then look at comprehension and production studies which employ self-paced reading and eye-tracking methods to complement the off-line judgments data with the on-line measures (reading times, fixations, regressions). Finally, a session will be dedicated to a small number of existing experimental studies on Bantu languages and how they informed theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. The course will involve a hands-on component where we’ll work together to design (and collect data) a small experimental study (PCIbex).
Perhaps the simplest and best-known outcome of language contact is lexical borrowing, in which one language influences the lexicon of another by donating loanwords. However, languages can also influence each other’s structures. Under certain socioeconomic conditions, contact can result in changes to a language’s phonetic inventory, phonological rules, or even its morphosyntactic structures. If three or more unrelated languages spoken within the same geographic region all show signs of structural borrowing, they are said to form a language area.
Over the past twenty years, the areal linguistic framework has increasingly been used to explain and explore the structural similarities that have developed between languages of southern Africa in the broader Kalahari Basin Area (KBA). At least 50 unrelated languages from across four unrelated language families – Khoe, Kx'a, Tuu, and Bantu – have all been involved in such close and complex contact for so many centuries that they have influenced each other’s linguistic structures. In particular, these unrelated languages have all come to share the use of click consonants as an integral feature of their phonology.
This course offers an introduction to structural convergence in the KBA, with a focus on the diffusion of click consonants across multiple unrelated languages. In addition to a basic theoretical foundation in structural borrowing and areal linguistics, we will study the cross-linguistic distribution of click consonants in southern Africa, and maybe even explore how Khoekhoe loanwords like ingqiniba (‘elbow’), iCawa (‘church’) and amawele (‘twins’) entered isiXhosa.
Recommended readings:
Güldemann, Tom and Anne-Maria Fehn. 2017. ‘The Kalahari Basin Area as a ‘Sprachbund’ before the Bantu Expansion’ in Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, 500 – 526. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Muysken, Pieter. 2008. ‘Introduction: Conceptual and methodological issues in areal linguistics’ in Pieter Muysken (ed.), From linguistic areas to areal linguistics, 1 – 24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Sands, Bonny and Hilde Gunnink. 2019. ‘Clicks on the fringes of the Kalahari Basin Area’ in Clem, E. (ed.) Theory and description in African linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th annual conference on African linguistics, 703 – 24. Berlin: Language Science Press.