SIL International Media Release
BANTU 3 conference in Belgium: Four SIL papers
(March 2009) The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), in Tervuren, Belgium, hosted BANTU 3—Third International Conference on Bantu Languages. The conference brought together specialists in the study of Bantu languages and history, including three SIL linguistics researchers.
The conference, held 25–27 March 2009, was organized jointly by the Service of Linguistics of RMCA and the Center for Grammar, Cognition and Typology of the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
Keynote speakers
- Vladimir Plungian (Institute of Linguistics, Moscow, Russia)
- André Motingea Mangulu (Université pédagogique nationale, Kinshasa, RD Congo)
- Jan Rijkhoff (Aarhus Universitet, Denmark)
Papers by SIL researchers
- Bonnie Henson (SIL; Canada Institute of Linguistics at Trinity Western University) "The development of copulas in Kol"
- Connie Kutsch Lojenga (SIL; Leiden University, The Netherlands) "[+ATR] affixes in Bantu languages"
- Myles Leitch (SIL; York University, Canada) "The split rainforest Bantu hypothesis: Reading history from vowel harmony variation in Zone C?"
- Myles Leitch, (SIL; York University, Canada) "Demonstrative and associative inversion in Dibole DP"
Connie Kutsch Lojenga also chaired a panel, "Nominal Morphology and Tonology."
Main topics of the conference
Abstracts were invited for presentations addressing all aspects of the analysis, description or comparison of Bantu languages, including the history and prehistory of Bantu-speaking peoples. Especially welcome, however, were contributions on three stated topics:
- Grammaticalization and semantic change
- Historical linguistics and multidisciplinary approaches to the history of Bantu-speaking peoples
- The noun phrase
Related links of interest
- Official conference Web site
- Bantu languages in the Ethnologue
- 2008 annual report
- "A survey report for the Bantu languages," by Derek Nurse, 2001
- Documentary linguistics seminar in Bantu languages (June 2008 media release)
- SIL FieldWorks software, which contains a tutorial of Sena, a Bantu language
- Software presented at symposium on Bantu languages (August 2008 media release)
- A Grammar of Akoose: A northwest Bantu language by Robert Hedinger, 2008
- Bantu Literacy Tool software (October 2008 media release)
- Bantu phonological analysis PTEST software (December 2007 media release)