About

Microvariation in Bantu languages of South Africa:
Building theories from typology data

This 6-year international project investigates the inter- and intra-language variation in Bantu languages as a collaboration between researchers in Japan and South Africa: the University of Venda in Limpopo and the University of the Free State. Conducting this project in these universities is ideal places because of the proximity to areas where speakers of Bantu languages are accessible. Superseding the 2-week workshop in March 2020 at the University of Venda, the current project aims to document a rich array of typological data and inform linguistic theories in a meaningful way. Specifically, this project has four specific goals:

1. Documenting inter- and intra-language variations at the interface between the prosody and sentence structures.

2. Documenting narratives for the discourse and dialect level variations.

3. Collecting archive-quality materials based on data obtained in (1) and (2).

4. Updating existing theories or proposing theories based on a new set of data.

This collaborative project will not only foster and cement research activities between Japan and South Africa, but also it will serve as a stepping stone for young researchers to engage in a long-term multi-faceted research program. Ultimately, the project will deepen our understanding of how the prosodic component and the morphosyntactic component interact in human languages.

Funding information:

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Promotion of Joint International Research (Fostering Joint International Research (B)) Grant Number 21KK0005.