From Canada to Guatemala: Connecting Knowledge and People through ICM

We're delighted to feature this posting by guest blogger Ilona Semchuk!

 

Research Ethics Workshop!

The Junior Forum session on October 26th will be open to all members of the department to discuss research ethics! Suzi Lima (faculty) and Susana Béjar (faculty) will be joining on behalf of the department's Ethics Committee. 

The workshop will feature:

• Q&A with Dean Sharpe (Research Ethics Board Manager for Social Sciences and Humanities) 
• Suzi and Susana speaking about the department Delegated Ethics Review Committee (DERC) 
• Readings and discussions on ethical protocols prepared by graduated students 

Please refer to the listserv email for more details! 

Guest speaker: Nico Nassenstein (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz)

This semester's Field Methods class, taught by Suzi Lima (faculty), is very pleased to welcome virtual guest speaker Nico Nassenstein, a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. His talk, "Linguistic change in Lingala: Urban language use and the emergence of new registers", will be taking place on Wednesday, March 10, at 6:00 PM. Please note that registration is required by March 9; see the email from Suzi for details.

Lingala is a Bantu language classified by Maho (2009) as C.30b [lin], which is spoken by approximately 40-45 million speakers (or more), see Meeuwis (2020) for an overview. Over the course of its history, Lingala (and its pidginized predecessor based on Bobangi; Meeuwis 2019) has been subject to interventions and adaptations by colonial agents, missionaries and linguists since the 1890s, and has given rise to a multitude of registers and ideas how and which Lingala represents 'correct' or 'incorrect' varieties (see for instance the list discussed in Sene Mongaba 2013, including Lingala ya basango, literary Lingala, Kinshasa Lingala etc.). Apart from Bangala, Lingala’s closest sister language in the northeastern parts of DR Congo (classified by Maho 2009 as C30a), and the northwestern dialect of Lingala, the variety used in the capital Kinshasa has been treated in most of the available recent studies (Motingea 2006, Meeuwis 2010, 2020). However, Kinshasa Lingala is no homogenous language but varies and is interpreted by different speakers depending upon the context of their interactions. What Sesep (1990) still labelled as Indoubil/Hindubil or the language of Kinshasa’s cowboys (Gondola 2016), is nowadays known as Lingala ya Bayankee or Yanké (van Pelt 2000, Nassenstein 2014) and is slowly changing from a youth language practice and 'street language' to a common medium of communication in urban Kinshasa, developing into an urban contact dialect or urban register (Wiese and Kerswill 2021). As a parallel development, Lingala speakers all around the world make increased use of a public language game or ludling, Langila (Nassenstein 2015), which expresses strong language ideologies of worldliness, global repertoires and 'fashionable' language use – especially across social media such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In my talk, I trace processes of current linguistic change that are observable in these urban and global language practices based on Lingala and bring them into relation to general patterns of contact and change in Bantu languages. I therefore try to connect early processes of change and compare them with current Kinshasa Lingala and its diverse registers. From a perspective of microvariation, my hypothesis is that despite the linguistic manipulations and agentive language use by urban youth etc. specific morphosyntactic changes in Lingala correspond with those found in other Bantu languages prone to urban diversification and multi-register emergence, e.g. Kiswahili (G.40), Kinyarwanda (JD.60) and Luganda (JE15).

Quechuan Languages Workshop

With Suzi Lima (faculty) and two language consultants at the helm, this semester's Field Methods class investigated two varieties of Quechua. Following up from last year's workshop on Iranian languages and 2017's on Malagasy, we are holding a Quechua Languages Workshop on Thursday, December 5, in the department lounge. Come hear about the research the students have been doing! (Note: if you would like to attend part or all of the workshop, please register here. Thanks!)

• Allyson Balaz (MA): "The semantics of cutting and breaking events in Quechua: A brief typological overview."
• Crystal Chow (MA): "Expressing paths of motion in Apurimac Quechua."
• Chanell Chlopowiec (BA): "When in Peru, do as the Quechua do: A linguistic analysis of compounding in Cuzco and Apurimac Quechua."
• Christina Duong (BA) and Seo Hyun Hong (BA): "Evidentiality: A comparison between Cusco and Apurimac Quechua."
• Ewen Lee (BA): "Resolving pronoun ambiguity in Calcauso Quechua."
• Rosie Owen (BA): "Metaphors in Cuzco Quechua."
• Mark Smith (BA): "Eliminating exceptions in Calcauso Quechua."

Iranian Languages Workshop

Our department has a cluster of scholars keenly interested in the languages of Iran. On top of that, this semester's JAL401: Field Linguistics class taught by Suzi Lima (faculty) collectively investigated Gilaki, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in the northwest of the country. In other to showcase their research, we will be holding a workshop on Iranian languages: Thursday, December 6, from 10 AM through 3 PM in the department lounge. All departmental members are encouraged to attend!

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (faculty):
"Everything I know about Gilaki."

Gregory Antono (BA):
"Allomorphy in Gilaki: An Optimality Theoretic approach."

Crystal Chen (BA):
"Adjectival order in Gilaki."

Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.):
"Definiteness in Laki: its distribution and properties."

Rosie Webb (BA):
"Modifier reduplication in Gilaki."

Kristina Springer (BA):
"The morphophonological analysis of verb affixation in Gilaki."

Jida Jaffan (MA):
"One way and the other: assessing the origins of Arabic and Gilaki loanwords based on the undergone linguistic processes."

Koorosh Ariyaee (Ph.D.):
"Loanword adaptation in Persian."

Liam Donohue (MA):
"Locating objects in space and time: An analysis of temporal-spatial copular constructions in Gilaki."

Breanna Pratley (BA):
"Distribution of active and passive constructions in Gilaki."

Congratulations, Vidhya!

Vidhya Elango (BA) is in Dublin, Ireland this week for the Global Undergraduate Summit, taking part from November 12 through 14. This event draws undergraduates from nearly 50 countries and 25 fields of study. Vidhya is in attendance having received a Highly Commended designation for her paper "Syllable structure of French loanwords in Malagasy: An OT perspective," originally written for faculty member Suzi Lima's Field Methods class in the Fall 2017 semester. Congratulations, Vidhya, on this very well-deserved recognition!

Malagasy Workshop: December 11, 2017

On December 11, in the Linguistics lounge, there will be a Malagasy Workshop showcasing work from this year's Field Methods course. Also featured are two invited talks by Ileana Paul (Western University) and Lisa Travis (McGill). All are invited. See the program and registration below.

Program: https://malagasyworkshop.wordpress.com/program/

Registration: https://malagasyworkshop.wordpress.com/registration/

Field Methods (JAL401H1 F/ LEC 5101) Malagasy Workshop

Field Methods (JAL401H1 F/ LEC 5101), taught by Suzi Lima, is holding a Malagasy Workshop on December 11th (2017). Students in the class will present their research projects on Malagasy, and there will also be talks from invited speakers Ileana Paul (Western University) and Lisa Travis (McGill). The room and schedule are TBA, but click here for the website and call for papers.

Field Methods 2013

This year's Field Methods class concluded last month with a party in the lounge. Here is a photo of the class with their consultant, Tamam Youssouf, a speaker of Oromo (Cushitic, Ethiopia). The food at the party included bacchoo (a mixture of roasted barley flour, honey, and clarified butter) and sambossas (Ethiopian samosas).


(Photo courtesy of Radu Craioveanu)

Field Methods 2012

Last week we had a reception in our Linguistic Field Methods Class. Here are some of the students from the class with Don Jabokwoam who has helped them learn some linguistics and a lot more about Ojibwe this Fall.

Left to right: Dan, Becky, Julien, Don, TJ, Julia, and Garth.

Post courtesy of Alana Johns