 Gweld i'n meddwl, I'm Paul Webley, I'm the director of SIRIS. I'd like to welcome you all in the audience tonight. Particularly those of you who've travelled a long way to be here, and to Professor Lutz Martin's parents, I'm told they're here somewhere, excellent wife, friends and colleagues. I did ask Lutz, I said, was his parents used to seeing him in this academic performance? He said yes, they always used to come to my gigs when I was younger. So, we have guests from many places here tonight. Some of people have travelled a long way to be here, and we really appreciate you taking the trouble. SIRIS inaugurals are something special. They're a ceremony. They're a rith pasage for the speaker, and the rith pasage element sometimes makes speakers even very experienced professors a bit nervous. I have to say Lutz has shown no signs of nerves whatsoever. He's relishing it. He's looking forward to it. He's going to deliver you a wonderful inaugural. No nerves at all. It's also an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole SIRIS community. Now, just some housekeeping beforehand. There's no fire drill. It would be a bit unorthodox to have a fire drill on an evening. So, if you hear a fire alarm, yes, you should panic. No, you shouldn't panic, but you should go out the fire exits, okay? The other thing you should do is to turn off your mobile phones. So, I'll just do that myself, because otherwise I always forget. There we are. Finally learning how to do it. Good. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the ninth one of the 2012-13 inaugural lecture series. I've read just one of Lutz's articles. It was on the meaning of money, which is an area I myself do research in. I enjoyed it greatly. I'm sure that the erudition, but also the accessibility that was on display in that article will also be on display this evening with his inaugural lecture on linguistic variation, language contact and the new comparative ban too. Professor Trevor Marchant will introduce Professor Martin tonight. Trevor, as one of our own, really needs no introduction at all, but I will say just a couple of things. Trevor qualified in practice architecture. I think everyone should do that first. And later received a PhD in anthropology from Sias, where he's now a professor. He's conducted field work with masons in Arabia and West Africa. And he's also worked with woodworkers and furniture makers in the UK. He's actually a very talented furniture maker himself, a man of many parts. He's the author of many books and a co-producer of a documentary film, Future of Mud. He's also recently run a marathon. I'm always very impressed when people do that. So, Trevor will do the introductions. The vote of thanks will be given by Professor Thalo Schadenberg from Leiden University. He's a professor of African linguistics. He's a particular interest in languages that are influenced by Swahili. He's published extensively. I had a look at the list and it was so long I had to stop. But vast amounts of things, including books on Swahili morphology. And I must confess my ignorance as a psychologist, languages that I had not heard of. Umbundu numweze, is that right? And a number of other things. He's had a major impact on the field of African linguistics and we're very grateful for him to be here tonight. So for Trevor and Professor Schadenberg, thank you very much indeed for being part of this event. Finally, and I say this now just so you know, at the end there's a reception in the Brunai Suite for some wine and some canapes. So do come up after the vote of thanks. So to introduce Professor Lutz Martin, I will now pass over to Professor Martin. Over to you, Trevor. Thank you, Paul. It's really a great pleasure and an honour to introduce Professor Lutz Martin on this very special evening. I've known Lutz for nearly two decades now. We met here at SOAS when Lutz was doing an MA in linguistics and I was starting my doctoral studies in anthropology. At that time, linguistics and anthropology shared the fifth floor of the Cyril Phillips building and there was ample opportunity for staff and students of both disciplines to interact with one another. That synergy I think formed the basis of our enduring friendship and our academic relationship. Lutz's intense curiosity about the nature of human cognition and communication continues to be an inspiration for me and for many other colleagues and students in the university. Over the years, my thinking about the human mind has been textured by structural linguistics and especially by Lutz's research and writing on the theory of dynamic syntax. In turn, Lutz's open-mindedness to anthropology has informed his practical field method for collecting linguistic data and his theoretical analyses emphasise the importance of context. Context really in the cognitive act of interpreting and generating dialogue. Collaborative interests eventually led to our convening a course in anthropology and linguistics. This drew students from both departments and reforged historic and productive links between the two disciplines. I much look forward to the opportunity once again working closely with Lutz. I also have to tell you that I cherish the memory of our student days together. Like all research students, we were busy reading writing M-FIL reports then dissertation chapters, preparing for supervisory meetings, working as teaching assistants and struggling to make ends meet in London. Lutz was the only student I knew at the time driving a vintage Mercedes Benz. Never quite got that one. Nevertheless, there seemed to be more time. There was more time to eat lunch together in the Soas Refactory, to discuss the modularity of mind or debate the structure of concepts or the function of symbols over a coffee or an all-day breakfast at the long-gone Greek cafe on now fashionable Stor Street. A quick evening pint often turned to two or more, finishing with the last one at the late night pub across from the Mount Pleasant postal station. After graduation, we were both fortunate to secure teaching posts at Soas in the exchange of ideas, readings and greetings continues. But perhaps less frequently than we would both like if it weren't for other commitments that work and life bring. Lutz's many friends and colleagues here this evening know that as his career flourishes and his reputation as a linguist and Africanist grows, it becomes ever more difficult to track him down. We've become reliant on his automatic email reply to tell us whether he's presently a visiting scholar in Brazil or China, conducting fieldwork somewhere in Africa, or giving a lecture in Dublin, Leiden or Berlin to an audience of formal linguists, Africanists or Bantuists. Staying true to my own training as an anthropologist, I sent Lutz a questionnaire while preparing this introductory talk. Some of the answers he sent back from Zambia merely confirmed a reminder me about Lutz's past training, his continuing aims and his great passion for his work as a researcher, teacher and administrator. Lutz's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. He remains one of the most popular teachers in Soas and a very skillful supervisor. His students leave not only with sound training in their discipline, but they also, along the way, discover a true pleasure and personal satisfaction in learning. Lutz has also served as the associate dean for learning and teaching in his faculty and later as the head of department for linguistics. He approached these administrative tasks with a sense of duty, responsibility and efficiency, but also with enjoyment and good humour and nature which makes him the highly valued colleague he is here at Soas. Other of Lutz's responses to my questionnaire filled the lacunae and my knowledge about his future plans and aspirations and helped me to gain a clearer overall picture of his diverse interests and expertise and how these connect to one another. And this is what he will do for us this evening in his inaugural talk. There are far too many scholarly and personal achievements to share with you in the short time I have left, but in my remaining minutes I hope to offer you a glimpse into Lutz's impressive trajectory to becoming a Soas Professor of General and African Linguistics. The cornerstones of Lutz's scholarly foundations were already in place during his undergraduate program at the University of his lovely native Hamburg. There he studied English language, literature and culture along with philosophy and African studies. Lutz grew quickly interested in language as an object of study, adopting a structural perspective to his analysis of German and English and notably that structuralist theory formed the basis for his later dynamic syntax work. At Hamburg he also began studying Swahili which as many of you know he now teaches and he continues to conduct field-based research in East Africa and is published extensively on the language including his colloquial Swahili coursebook co-authored with Donovan McGrath. Lutz's move into Swahili at the undergraduate level introduced him to African languages more generally and provided a foray into another of his fields of expertise namely comparative linguistics. Lutz's long connection with Soas began with an MA in linguistics followed by a PhD conducted under the brilliant and energetic supervision of Professor Ruth Kempsen. It was during these years that he worked on the theory of dynamic syntax modeling the complex cognitive actions involved in dialogue interpretation. Importantly dynamic syntax shifts the emphasis from competence to performance or in Gilbert Ryle's terms from knowing that to knowing how. This groundbreaking research was carried out with Ruth Kempsen, Ronnie Kahn and others resulting in a plethora of publications including a soul-authored monograph at the syntax-pragmatics interface which is grounded in Lutz PhD research and presents an absorbing exploration of verbal under-specification and concept formation. As well as the weighty co-authored monograph, The Dynamics of Language which has provided me and scholars of other disciplines including music, philosophy and cognitive studies with endless food for thought. Lutz started in 1999 as a lecturer in his home department of linguistics. After spending two years as a prestigious Millennium Research Fellow he was appointed lecturer, then senior lecturer in Southern African languages. This appointment reflected his rapidly expanding interest in scholarship in African languages including impressively Swahili, Bamba, Hadiyah, Luganda, Zulu, Horero, Luguru, Kiluguru and other Eastern, Central and Southern African languages. Lutz's comparative study of Bantu languages meticulously investigates variation in morphological and syntactic structure and his analysis consider how such variation is reflected in different communicative practices and what drives who to say what to whom and why. I think these are really fascinating questions to ask. In his remarkable number of publications many co-authored with his wife Nancy Kula also a talented linguist. Lutz demonstrated acute intellectual agility by combining theoretical linguistics with comparative analysis. While exploring the cognitive structures of online language interpretation Lutz has paid thoughtful attention to the communicative setting and its role in interpreting and generating utterance. Discovering variation or an unexpected usage or structure he told me keeps me excited about working with primary language data. His long-term goals are ambitious. Lutz seeks to employ his vast knowledge of African languages their structure, function and use to better understand human language more generally. He is motivated by the daunting challenge to one day explain the uniformity of language with a theory that accommodates linguistic variation, change and the setting of everyday dialogue. No small task. I end with a quote from our recent email exchange that I think captures the deep almost primordial questions that have driven Lutz from an early date and that will continue to steer his exploration in the years ahead. Language is so pervasive in our lives. It's alls around us and everyone can do it so it's often taken for granted. But the more you look at language the clearer it becomes how structured and complex it is and it provides one of the most valuable clues we have to understanding our cognitive and cultural selves. I now hand over to the man himself, Professor Lutz Martin. I'm not wearing the hat so you can see my hat. Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you much, Trevor, for the kind words. The vintage Mercedes after a long consideration and thoughts I've decided to sell it. It still exists in my parental garage. I think I've now changed my mind. I'll keep it. Okay, thank you all very much for coming. It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a great pleasure to see so many friendly faces. Let me see that I can get my own slides up. I see. Oh, sorry, I didn't do that myself. Okay, linguistic variation, language contact and the new comparative Bantu. I have, I fear too many slides. I see how it goes. But it is, it's topics which are close to my heart. It reflects very much what Trevor said in his very kind introduction. And I thought it's important to share that with you. It also has quite a lot of data but you can't really do these things without data. So again, I think it was the right decision and then there will be the wine reception afterwards. So we can see whether that was, never mind. Okay. I'm going to briefly start with an overview of the main points. Then I start historically and talk about how people have compared Bantu languages and then talk a bit about Bantu trees. That's a particular theoretical approach to comparing Bantu languages. Then, and this, the one and two, that sort of historical background. The third part, the morphosyntactic variation, that's sort of my own narrative. That's collaborative work, but that's where my own work comes in more. Then mediated convergence, that's new. That's really special for tonight. I thought of it just yesterday. So, but it's great. I really believe in it and I'm excited about it. And then I have a few conclusions at the end. Before I start the votes of things, I want to thank all my teachers. Being an academic has something slightly generational. So you have teachers and then you have students and you hope to pass something on from the teacher to the students. So thanks to my teachers. Thanks to my students, my PhD students, master students, students who go to my classes, dynamic syntax, the Bantu languages, language in Africa. I find teaching extremely motivating. A lot of stuff which is here tonight actually comes from interaction with students over the years. Collaborators and co-authors in academia, you never walk alone. These are people I've worked with in the past and there's many more, but I just wanted to share the names with some of them. And then also family and friends and unfortunately I ran out of space on this slide. But also thanks to them. Okay, overview and main points. Comparative linguistics provides key insights into how languages work. That's why I think it's exciting. Again, in the perspective of what Trevor was saying. Recent advances in Bantu comparative linguistics result from better description of Bantu languages. That's important. We know much more now about Bantu languages than we used 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. But also from development of linguistic theories such as analysis of morphosyntactic variation and language contact. And it's that interface between better descriptions and theoretically informed questions which I think makes Bantu studies and linguistics in general very exciting at the moment. Language contact people have shown leads to the similarity of languages. It's sometimes called convergence coming together. But sometimes convergent is found between languages which are not in direct contact. And this is the mediated convergence I'm so proud of. And I'm going to show you what that means. I have examples from Bambasul and Swahili. And I hope at the end of the evening you get a better sense of why I think this is really important to do. Okay, this thought of historically back on if you like comparing Bantu languages. This is a map of Africa and the shaded parts are the Niger Congo language. Which is the orange shaded part. That's where Bantu languages are spoken. So it's a huge part geographically of Africa. There are about 300 to 500 Bantu languages there spoken but 240 million speakers often done. Counting languages and counting speakers is a very, very difficult enterprise. So these are just bold part figures really. Spoken 27 countries and on the map you can see there's a fraction of named Bantu languages in geographic space. Historically the early description of Bantu languages we have come from there's a bunch of Swahili words in the writing of Ibn Battuta. Excuse me. We have Portuguese sources from the 15th and 17th century and then various 19th century sources. William Blake, William Blake is important for counting the term Bantu as the name for the family. It's a root meaning people in many Bantu languages and then he thought that's a useful designation for the overall group. Meinhof then reconstructed the first proto-Bantu and in the beginning of the 20th century got three from here. Meinhof by the way his place of work was Hamburg so that's why I'm from so I always feel very close to Meinhof. And Guthrie of course comes from here so I feel very close to Guthrie as well because he was at Sohas and spent a long time of his life working here and is famous for his classification of Bantu into geographical zones in the north, south, east. That sort of thing. After the war there was work in Belgium and Leiden actually where Bartilo is from by a linguist Eichel Merison who looked more at the grammar and then further on his group developed good instruction and currently there's computation and statistic methods. I'll come back to that a bit later on but it's not life changingly important. This is even Bartuto or at least you know it's a picture which could be even Bartuto because we actually have no idea what he looked like. But he is sort of one of the first people we know something about Bantu languages. This is William Blake a very important person. He was one of the few trained linguists in this setup. This is one of them before and after shots so it went out to the Cape Town well groomed and then he worked on Bantu languages and actually Cwysan languages. This is Meinhof a priest by profession very severe looking Protestant priest of course with the big beard. This is Guthrie. He looks a bit like me. Also not a linguist he is a trained engineer and you can see it's all white middle class male and then I wanted to show this picture. This is more contemporary. These are colleagues I work with. Ykura Kawarifan Namibia and the middle Haman Batibu one of the big big heavyweights in African linguistics really and just that sliding into the picture Roslit Solibantysen tactician. So it sort of shows that it's no longer white obviously but it's also a much more friendly environment than it maybe used to be in the past. Maybe it was just the photo opportunity but. But it's you know and I mean I'm not joking. It's important that your colleagues are friendly and you have an environment which support what you're doing when African linguistics certainly does that. Okay, let us go to trees. One striking thing about Bantu languages is that if you compare them if you look at them you find very easily similarity. So the Swahili word for three is tattoo and the Bemba word for three is also tattoo. The same for farming or cultivating Lima Lima the word for drum and goma in both languages and if there are differences like the word for name is it's Gina in Swahili, ishina in Bemba or the word for fireplace jiku in Swahili, ishiku in Bemba you'll see that the differences are A, slight and B more importantly they're systematic. So every dir in Swahili corresponds to sh in Bemba and for comparative linguists that's really important because based on lexical and phonological evidence that is by word comparison and sound correspondences like the Swahili dir or dir o dir and the Bemba sh that's how you can try to establish relationship between the languages involved and one typical theoretical approach which goes back to the early 19th century actually earlier than that is seen in the quote by William Marston who never was in Africa I think but he was living in London but he knew Africans so he knew about reports and stories and he comments on the relation between Western and Eastern Bantu languages that is Bantu language from Kenya and Tanzania and from the Congo that the instances of resemblance and words expressing the simplest ideas may be thought sufficient to warrant belief that the nations by whom they are employed must at a remote period have been more intimately connected so the analysis here is essentially historical what he says is these languages are similar let's explain that and the explanation is in the past there used to be one language and that was the language from which both developed it's a classic model of language comparison which assumes that languages develop over time like branches of a tree so essentially Marston copied that from the revelation of Indo-European and so William Jones 30, 40 years before that had the observation with Latin and Greek and Sanskrit Latin and Greek and Sanskrit are really similar therefore they must in the past be related as in there was one speaker community and that is the birth of Indo-European so in a sense Marston sort of copies that into the African context Harry Johnston in the 1920s has that graphically so he has a little map where he thinks this is development of Bantu languages and you can see it's a sort of a tree it's a bit sort of you know grown wildly but the idea is that the origin comes from the shaded point just underleg chart and then the language is sped southwards and westwards and a modern version is a very comprehensive study by Bastaun Coupé and Michael Mann again he was here at Saws comparing about 250 languages based on 100 word comparisons so essentially they send word lists out to schools and other contexts collecting words and then comparing them and then having a public computer programme for the time to get this tree a modern version based on the same same data is from Holden and Grange you can see with the colouring here that they try to relate it to geographical space but the problem with that is that Bantu trees and not only Bantu trees any languages assume that language would change and become more different over time that is they assume divergence and that's true but it's only partly two and this is partly born out but born out but languages may become more similar over time as well that is there is divergence and convergence due to language contact in bi or multilingual situations and that's quite common in Africa many speakers of Bantu languages speak more than one Bantu language and through that you get effects that the languages become more similar and that's the theme I'm going to develop further this is a quote from the Bastalle at Al study to the confusion of the tree model shared innovation is independent of ancestry the most we can say of two languages that display a number of innovations in common is that they have shared a period of linguistic community but whether that's that's historic ancestry or being in contact that is left open and from that we at some stage decided that different data and different models may address this problem that I mean it's not only us there's lots of other people who travel the same path but for the particular study I have that comes from here and that's the morphosyntactic variation it comes from a project we had at the beginning of the millennium an HST funded project with a number of collaborators Ruth Campsson and I were working on it and Clachla Twala who's now back in Witzfaltasrand Anna McCormack, Rydw Clan, Miriam Huzedau were the students at the time and as part of that study it was a study on romance and Bantu so there were other results but as part of that study we did a comparative study of Bantu morphosyntactic variation that is we looked at grammar rather than words not lexicon but morphology syntax word order we had 20 parameters we looked at for 20 languages and qualitative results and quantitative results I won't go into much detail but there's one thing I want to show you and this is this one here this is a comparison between five languages of the samples Swahili, Bemba, Chechewa, Syswati and Herreho and I have a map of that right now and it has on the left hand side numbered 1 to 14 and there's A's and B's which you don't need to worry about these are the particular grammatical structures found in these languages it's to do with object mark and relative clauses the details don't matter but it means that we can say for each language is this feature present in the language yes or no and that's the yes or no we see here now if we calculate the shared values we get percentages number so the similarity between Chewa and Swahili is 73% that is they share 73% of these features the relationship between Bemba and Swahili is 67 slightly lower projected on a map and I'm sorry about the resolution that what that looks like is that there's two groups of languages if you like there's one group which is this one here Swahili, Bemba and Chechewa they share over 65 of structure relations so this is a percentage 67% actually and more on the other and Herreho and Syswati are below 60 and sometimes way below 60 and the 40s and 50s lots of disclaimers two small data two small data set not enough parameters this might not be indicative but it's interesting and it made us think what might be behind that and we came up with a contact-related explanation and two flavours really one is the peripheral languages Herreho and Syswati that's the blue ones here Herreho and Syswati have a history of contact with Coresan languages so they are in contact with languages which are very different from Bantu and therefore maybe slightly different but they are not used much by speakers of other languages so if you are a Herreho speaker you tend to be a first language Herreho speaker you may speak another language but there are not many people who speak another language and then learn Herreho as a second language and that's true also for Syswati Bemba, Chechewa and Swahili that's the orange ones which are closely related they are not in direct contact and direct contact explanation doesn't quite work but they are all lingua francas with a high number of second language speakers who usually speak another Bantu language as first language so from that we thought maybe the structural similarity between Bemba, Chechewa and Swahili may result from the use of lingua franca and hence from language contact with other Bantu languages not direct contact but indirect contact with little languages spoken in the respective areas and that is what I mean by indirect or mediated contact so in other words although not in direct contact lingua franca has become more similar due to indirect contact or mediated convergence and I have created little graphics to illustrate that maybe more clearly Swahili and Bemba are blue and they are not in contact so they don't touch each other but they are spoken in areas where there are other languages these are the little orange ones and I haven't given them names but I could name them a bit later I just got them ABCD la la la these are Bantu languages spoken in the area where Swahili and Bemba are spoken now Swahili and Bemba are in contact with the other Bantu languages not in direct contact but in contact with the other languages through that contact they become more similar not only to the little orange ones at the bottom but also to each other so even though there is no direct vertical horizontal relationship through similar vertical relationships you get an effect of a horizontal one so the question then is can we find evidence for indirect convergence due to influence from first languages or local languages on lingua francas any guesses? well it would be a stupid lecture I then said no there is no evidence so yes we can okay I have two examples actually there's lots of more examples it was very painful to decide what to put in and what to leave out but I have two examples one is diminutive classes 12-13 that will become clear in a moment car and two and the other is the habitual marker ag okay mediated convergence I'm going to look at Swahili I'm going to look at Bemba I'm going to look at Zulu for the Zulu I'm a bit sad there is really more to be said about Zulu but I don't think I actually have no idea can anybody stop me? good good well there is the wine reception I quite realised that okay not too much about Zulu not too much about Bemba either but I need Bemba as my second lingua franca but I'm going to concentrate on Swahili and I'm going to look at contact phenomena between Swahili and smaller local Tanzania languages like Cagulu Chindamba Yamwesi and Ruri all these are community languages in Tanzania the vast majority of speakers of these languages speak Swahili as a second language and I'm going to show with these two examples that the Swahili spoken by second language speakers changes in contrast to what is called standard Swahili and becomes not only more similar to the little languages Chindamba, Cagulu, Yamwesi, Ruri but also more similar to Bemba in which it is not indirect contact indirect contact mediated convergence okay convergence effects in colloquial Swahili as opposed to standard Swahili the first example diminutive noun classes K and 2 have been lost in standard Swahili are reintroduced into colloquial Swahili through contact with Tanzanian home languages the second one the habitual marker ag has been lost in standard Swahili but is reintroduced into colloquial Swahili through contact with Tanzanian home languages the argument is exactly the same it's the examples which are different this is a little homage to my friend Donovan because this is from the cover of our colloquial Swahili books I'm very fond of that little picture but I've used it here to briefly talk a bit about Swahili along the East African coast from Somalia down to Mozambique now a linger of Franca of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda parts of the DSE in Mozambique and the majority of Swahili speakers are by a multilingual in Swahili and another Bantu language as the first home language or other language and actually as an aside that's changing towards Swahili a bit so I say that later there's a bit of urgency in describing these situations and describing the small Tanzanian and other Southern African languages because there's quite a bit of shift towards Swahili and other bigger languages and other contexts ok first example this is the Swahili noun class system noun classes are like gender systems in French or German so German has three genders Swahili has eleven it's actually not that hard to learn but it looks impressive and you can tell by the prefix so class one has m and the plural these tend to be singular plural pairs so it's one person, several people class three the three meaty trees five, six seven, eight nine, ten they are the same forms but you can tell from agreement patterns that they are different class eleven that's great, that's the standard Swahili what has happened historically that Crosland standard Swahili has lost another pair of classes which are called 12, 13 and the numbering is entirely conventional there is no reason to it these classes are K and 2 and are used to make things small they are diminutive classes and Swahili replaces that with the use of class 7, 8 for making things small however in colloquial maintenance Swahili K, 2, 12, 13 have reappeared reflecting influence from home languages an overview about noun classes in Bantu this is a comparative table Pb here that's proto-Bantu the reconstructed ancient language but what I'm after maybe is Bemba which we've seen Swahili and Swahili are the same in this respect standard Swahili in Damba, Nyamwesi these are two little Tanzani and home languages and what I'm after is class 12, 13 it's reconstructed for proto-Bantu that's enough it's there in Bemba, K, 2 it's gone in Zulu it's gone in standard Swahili but it's there in Damba, Nyamwesi and I'm saying that because it's there in Damba, Nyamwesi and other languages like it it has reappeared in colloquial Swahili similar to Bemba the reconstruction is this is from the word from Achil Merson that a stem normally appearing in a given pair of classes could be used in class 12 and 13 with diminutive meaning that just means you can use these classes to make things small and we can see that in Bemba a person is umuntu people are abantu small person akantu little people utuntu so we have umu aba class 12 for person and people and then the same stem with class 12, 13 akantu to make people small Zulu has lost that completely so that's one case study if you like and invented a completely new form namely an ending ana from a word historically meaning child Imbusi the goat, Imbusana small goat, ifu the cloud ifana the small cloud and umfula the river umfundlana the small river so that's Zulu and that's fine Swahili as I said uses class 7 so ndege is the bird in class 9 a small bird kidege in class 7 but many Bantu, in Tanzania Bantu languages retain class 12, 13 cindamba an kemwezi cindamba lipiki the tree, ka piki a small tree nyamwezi that's one of Tilo's work umguana the child kana a small child so there you can see the ka prefix now Koloka maynet Swahili um reintroduces class 12 and maybe to a last act in 13 to mark the minute of standard Swahili we've seen that wa-toto children ki-toto small child vi-toto small children standard Swahili class 7, 8 now in contrast Koloka it's really wa-toto the same ka-toto two-toto that's the class 12, 13 which you find in mainland Koloka it's Swahili another example standard Swahili it's a small field it's a textbook example I'm not quite sure what the context for that is but ki-toto is a small field is the agreeing the Koloka Swahili version is ka-toto ka-toto so you can see that's the only difference but it's noticeable in Koloka Swahili to a widespread in the spoken language they're not used much in literary language except maybe in dialogues they're found in newspapers and other media such as emphasis or irony and a lot of the examples I have here there's electronics for helicropos so I checked the novels and I didn't find a single instance except for this one and this one is from a dialogue and it's a bit like we know that from Shakespeare if you want to look at colloquial forms you look at the dialogue of poor people or colloquial people they speak like what Shakespeare thought normal people spoke and then you can wonder whether that's true but that's where you get colloquial data so this one here is what's the problem ka-shida ka-togo very small problem not even to worry about Nina Hitaji ha-tia I need a birth certificate and that's actually not quite such a small problem because in this particular context the addressing buyer can't quite just issue the birth certificate so this is the meaning here or the pragmatic effect is to make the example smaller that actually is the next example, Finland kan-shika-togo-an-bak-o-leo-kan-a-ong-gosa quoting in Nizag-i-wa-sim-wem-kon-oni-ha-p-o-ling-wen-gu Finland, a tiny country which today is leading in the production of mobile phones in the world now Finland is not a tiny country in terms of space but the context here is that this is an article congratulating the DRC to introduce a Swahili language academy and the point is that even a small country like Finland has its own language Finnish and there are so few people but they still maintain Finnish literacy, Finnish books they are leading in the production of its Nokia I guess of mobile phones so that's why the emphasis on a small country if even a small country like Finland can do it then we big countries in Africa surely should be able to use our own languages for economic development nil-si-ki-a-ki-se-ma-ku-wa-ha-ka-ka-ru-shwa-ka-kwe-to-ala ha-ka-ka-ru-shwa-ka-kwe-to-nik-i-togo-sana I heard him say this little bit of corruption we have it's so small it's not even worth talking about there was a big issue with corruption in Tanzania couple of years ago as you can see so you can see the rhetoric effect here the next one I personally cannot respect the president who's been elected by such a tiny little group of people and again it's the politics and the rhetoric behind it you find it in social media sites so this is a little chat site and this is Eddie Murphy the American comedian and it's a comment on Eddie Murphy who is 51 apparently having a new girlfriend who is 28 and then the caption of this contributor who is called Babylon he writes and then the reply of Buji Buji who is a more experienced blogger actually he says let's get real so he said 28 is not a small child so she is maybe younger but she is not like a little baby but it's interesting that he now uses the class 3 standard Swahili agreement and they write under noun classes we have these sort of noun classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, up to 14 but they include these ones here car, double star, two, double star so they acknowledge this car and two are there but they start and by the double star they mean words which are marked by two stars result from one to influence and they are the words which are marked by two stars result from one to influence and have not yet been universally accepted as standard Swahili even though some people are using them so there's a clear understanding that the forms are used they are not accepted standard Swahili and it's also very clear that they come from second language influence so what that means is that mainland colloquial Swahili mainly used as a second language reintroduces Bantu features in this case diminutive classes car and two which had been lost in coastline standard Swahili through this colloquial Swahili has become more similar to Tanzanian home languages like Jin Damba and Yamwesi that's a standard conversion case so they become more similar because they are in contact but also to Bemba with which it is not in contact so that is the mediated convergence through the influence of the small Tanzanian languages colloquial Swahili changes and becomes more similar to Bemba which has retained the car to class 12, 13 markers the second example the habitual aga due to influence from other Bantu languages colloquial Swahili uses an aspectual habitual suffix ag which has historically been lost in Swahili so there used to be reconstructed aspectual suffix ag imperfective repetitive habitual which has been lost in Swahili so it goes to zero and then in addressing that actually like has developed a new habitual marker who based on a form it doesn't terribly matter where that's coming from so you get a sentence like in standard Swahili where do you usually eat where do you usually eat and the who there is the habitual marker it means like every day if it's a campus conversation which Mensa do you go to however many Tanzanian Bantu languages retain the habitual ag so this is an example from Gragulu of the work of Malin Petzel from Gothenburg which is Haka Eidiaga this is the ag she came once per week and we can see the habitual marker with the ag which is lost in Swahili Chiruri this is from David Massamba who is one of the co-authors of the green grammar we've just seen Eini Gouraga I buy regularly and again we see the ag now in colloquial mainland Swahili we have reintroduction of ag so a sentence where do you usually eat which in standard Swahili would have the who comes out as ag and this is presumably due to the reintroduction of the morphological habitual marker ag originally lost due to language change by second language speakers of cognitive languages so it's the same story just a different example ag ag is found mainly in the spoken language it's a marker of mainland non-standard Swahili and therefore it can be used as a marker of social linguistic non-confirmative innovation and as such it's a great candidate for youth language so people are quite aware of these non-standard forms and this is one of them and one way where that shows is in a fairly popular Tanzanian song called Hakunaga by an artist called Sumali it was the song of the year of radio one of Dar es Salaam in 2011 or something I didn't know it either but I'm slightly out of touch with the youth movement but if you are a young person you would probably know about it but what is interesting is that this song is called Hakunaga but there is actually isn't a word like Hakunaga not even a colloquial Swahili there is a word Hakuna which you probably have come across in Hakuna Matata which yeah the jungle book is it so Hakuna means there isn't so Hakuna Matata means no problem so Hakuna is there so what Sumali does he adds this ag meaningless if you like so it's not an habitual but as a marker of speaking non-standard subordinate Swahili and he does that not only for the Hakuna but he goes through quite a number of the lyrics so this is one stanza of four lines Kosala kuni ombam sahama hakunaga you don't ask me for forgiveness and there is nothing between us ila na ombam samaa to party shaga but I'm asking for forgiveness just so to clear the air na we umini bumili asana mi mi o mi sija o naga you have persevered with me you have put up with me you have to continue with me in a way I have not seen another girl who'd already have ditched me Angeshaku wa mingine so it's a little love song and he's very happy that his girlfriend is very enduring but see what's happening aga aga aga aga so it rhymes nicely but like Hakuna ishaga isn't really a good Swahili word either so isha is to finish to party krisha isha means that we can finish our discord sija oona is a wonderful form sija o naga again it's not an habitual this is purely a marker of you know colloquialness and this is the moaga slightly different that's a lexic word meaning to say farewell I briefly want to show that to you because it's a nice video as well if this one works and what we want to look at I can just briefly say it's one minute ten to one minute twenty seven I'm not sure whether you can see that very well and I'm not sure whether you can hear it either it starts with Zulu for some reason don't mind ah this is the girlfriend you can see her kaisha moaga okay yes so you can see the artistic value in these forms and that people are really aware of it so there's a lot of social linguistic package in there let me conclude by saying that the Swahili examples show the reintroduction of morphosyntactic features from second language speakers into colloquial Swahili they often carry specific pragmatic or social linguistic function so it's not an accident quite that they are used, especially the second examples really show that A speakers are aware of it and they use it in a very you know it's not conscious but certainly informed social linguistic fashion they also have a distinct semantic contribution and that's something again it would be nice to spend a bit more time on the particular examples I've chosen and the habitual they are not isolated in Swahili we have similar examples from Losi in western Zambia where class 1213 got lost and got reintroduced and that's fairly well documented from local languages and we have habitual aga in Kikongo again in a similar situation where it got lost for some reason and then reintroduced to second language speakers so it might be that it's to do with this particular semantics that we have these effects which would be nice to look at in the future not only for those but also for those is whether there is recurrence of these semantics not only in Bantu but in other African or indeed non-African languages and I come back to that maybe after these two points the result is that colloquial Swahili becomes more similar to Tanzania home languages through language contact as well as to other Bantu languages such as BEMBA through indirect mediated convergence so there is no direct contact but still they become similar and that's for classification really a complicated issue because the tree method really can't deal with that so that's why it's interesting from a contact perspective what is also interesting is that there has been quite a bit of discussion about linguistic areas and linguistic geographic areas showing convergence effects and it would be very interesting to see whether these effects are also found in other big lingua francas like Hindi or like Indonesian Arabic and whether we have similar effects which is what we see here okay the case study shows more general developments different approaches to comparing Bantu languages such as historic comparative classification divergence and trees I don't want to say that this is a wrong method it's just one of many methods and we have to see that we get a good picture by using different methods contact with in and without Bantu and indirect contact and then also dialect and social variation that's important so for all these examples we need to have a good understanding of colloquial spoken Swahili in addition to literary standard Swahili this whole is based on better and timely descriptions of more Bantu languages I mentioned that before a lot of the languages I've used here are moderately endangered up to even more than moderately endangered so to get good descriptions is important and of course comparative work like this you can only do if you have sufficient data from enough languages in order to draw this wider picture and it's based on better understanding of more syntactic variation multilingualism, language contact and social language variables so this is where our theoretical advances really have helped to understand better how we can best interpret the situation we have in Bantu I think with that I stop and say thank you and then hand over to Tilo I guess very good thank you very much Spectabilius Professor Martin Lutz colleagues and friends it is with great pleasure yet not without nervousness that I stand here before you about to deliver the traditional vote of thanks my delight is easy to explain having been invited to fill this venerable slot is a great honour for which I am most grateful to you Lutz and to Soas but once the tension it is not lack of familiarity this is the 17th Soas inaugural lecture ceremony that I have the pleasure of witnessing thanks to YouTube is it my dress then this Calvinist robe that makes me feel like a crow among woodpeckers while even the proverbial blackbird has a yellow beak and amberings around his eyes to brighten his appearance rather not and though I won't deny that I'm a bit jealous of your colourful gowns, hats and hoods I know that Lutz and I agree that black is beautiful no it is the title of his lecture that makes me ill at ease or rather the last phrase of it the new comparative Bantu and within that phrase more specifically the adjective new this to me sounds like the announcement of a change of paradigm inaugural lectures are an excellent opportunity to place oneself in the field and to announce to a wider academic audience which way one is heading oneself and in which new direction one will try to lead the field being if anything definitely a representative of old comparative Bantu Lutz in fact calls on me to reflect on where I myself and my generation have come to the end of the road I found at least some of Lutz's points of criticism in his review of a thick book with the admittedly pretentious title the Bantu languages he notes are I quote there are at least two major thematic omissions there is insufficient discussion of theoretically informed work on Bantu in particular on Bantu syntax and semantics and of sociolinguistic and anthropological aspects of Bantu languages and then he continues I think these omissions are not accidental rather they seem to follow from an editorial decision essentially to restrict the scope of the book to alongside other alongside descriptive work and the historical comparative tradition which of course is the context in which the editors work this is a pity as this narrow scope does no service to the study of Bantu languages end of quote I was not the editor right the points Lutz makes have a much wider application than merely to the book under review if they did it would be out of place to cite them here I admit that scholars of Bantu languages of my generation included have paid less attention to social, cultural and applied aspects than to description and comparison and within descriptive and comparative Bantu studies some topics have dominated others have been under exposed descriptions of Bantu languages were primarily concerned with morphology and after 1968 the year of the sound pattern of English also with phonology syntax and semantics were definitely less looked at I have phrased a slightly different from the way Lutz did who points to a deficiency in theoretically informed work in Bantu it seems to me in this respect Bantu phonologists generally have a much better record than most Bantu syntacticians who were few and far between in fact Bantu phonology and morphophonology have often been on the forefront of new developments in phonological theory just think of Larry Hyman Charles Kitterbeth John Goldsmith could be a mother's post-4thian concepts of tone and stress owe everything to the analysis and ever more refined re-analyses of Bantu languages starting with Zonga, Zulu and Ganda why was our interest so ill balanced I would like to suggest that the preference for phonology and morphology over syntax and semantics may be due at least in part to our less than perfect knowledge of project languages for the non-speaker or semi-speaker linguist it is difficult but possible to arrive at a good, insightful and quite complete description of the sound inventory and the morphological paradigms of a language for syntax and semantics this is much harder for my student days in Hamburg I remember the professor's tale about field work and he asked the speaker can you say this and this the answer which was not meant to be funny or frivolous was yes you can but we don't the anecdote reveals limitations of data elicitation fortunately there are other ways open to the non-native or semi-speaker to arrive at new insights the study of texts and transcripts of speech Lutz is a master of using and analysing such resources as we have had just had the pleasure to observe when he is in some of the examples on some of the slides when he discussed the reintroduction of the car diminutivity arch habitual into colloquial varieties of Swahili there's another reason by Mantu is another descriptive and comparative linguist in Europe or better I should say in Europe and Great Britain of our colleagues in the United States have kept a safe distance from dominant syntactic theory and vice versa early transformational grammar talking about way way back did not look favourably at the descriptive study of variation which was seen as not adding much to our ascending of linguistic theory each language in itself being a perfect incarnation of human language there was quite some bitterness around language variations this is largely past time now as we can see here today both sides have been winners linguistic theory has itself become immensely varied and language variation is seen as a treasure growth Lutz is undeniably theoretically well informed to use an understatement with a firm base in dynamic syntax on several occasions I've heard Lutz present the basics of dynamic syntax like myself utterly uninformed about the model and I've admired its usefulness and his elegance in shedding fresh light on for example the far-reaching implications of agreement with conjoined noun phrases that we have in Bantu Excellent Turning to comparative linguistics the subject of the first part of this inaugural lecture I would like to distinguish two goals one's goal may be either to study language change or history or one's goal may be to understand human language faculty the two goals meet when you aim to study language evolution and sometimes you can use the same data to pursue both goals and I think that is what we have witnessed today thank you please allow me as a representative of the old school to add a short remark on the comparative method differed from what some people assume both within and outside the field constructing trees is not the only or main objective of historical comparative linguistics trees can be interpreted as an image of ancestry depicting ever-growing diversity in splits but sub-classification is not the core element of the classical comparative method and has been but a minor concern of the great Bantu scholars whose pictures we have seen break mine of Guthrie and I must add Mason without a picture Michael Mann whose name we have heard a student of Guthrie's stated quite clearly in the book that his Bantu trees of which we have seen a sample do not represent change over time and maybe I can ask later I have often been wondering about the significance of the SOAS logo the approximately 500 Bantu languages are one of the two largest closely knit groups of related languages in the world sharing much of their complex morphology but arranging and rearranging it in ever-new patterns as such as we have seen today they form a wonderful exciting natural laboratory of language variation it is precisely this variation and the social constellations that feed it that are at the center of the new comparative linguistics and Bantu studies the Bantu universe offers a unique chance to see the dynamics of human language at work we need both kinds of linguistic work theory driven and general descriptive including but not restricted to pioneering documentation of endangered and or under studied languages small and large we are grateful to SOAS for its long-standing and continuing commitment to both kinds of linguistic research the better we know our object languages the more fruitful our research is likely to be this is where language teaching and language learning comes in and again we must be grateful to the world's leading institution for the study of Asia Africa and the Middle East Swahili as we have seen today though being Africa's best and most widely studied Bantu language still has a lot to offer to the researcher this institution SOAS may be proud of a long chain of excellence Swahili scholars and teachers and a name just one Ethel Ashton writer of in 1944 of the Swahili grammar of unfading fame and authority but also co-author of a grammar of Luganda 1954 we are fortunate in knowing that Lutz is going to continue this great tradition so I have said my thanks for the invitation I want to congratulate SOAS for appointing an accomplished scholar as a professor of African and general linguistics three I thank you all for coming here this evening to celebrate this event most importantly however I would like you all to join me in thanking professor Lutz Martin for his illuminated and illuminating lecture on comparative Bantu studies may there be many more to come thank you