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Peter Coutros (BantUGent) and Igor Matonda (UNIKIN), together with their team of local assistants including Isidore Nkanu, left early August from Kikwit (Kwilu Province, DRC) on a 6-week archaeological fieldwork mission along the Kwilu-Kasai-Loange river network as part of the BantuFirst project. They will also explore the Kasai-Kamtsha confluence area in the proximity of which linguists of the BantuFirst team have situated the new West-Coastal Bantu homeland.
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Congolese gestures in Inongo
Italian gestures in Inongo
The Province of Mai-Ndombe from above
Explaining genetic research at ISP Inongo
Community gathering in Bolingo
Lorenzo Maselli (BantUGent), a PhD student affiliated with the BantuFirst team, recently came back from a field mission in the DRC that was financed to a large extent by the BantuFirst project. On this research trip, Lorenzo was accompanied by Jean-Pierre Donzo, a former PhD candidate at our department, currently professor in African Linguistics at the ISP Gombe, in Kinshasa. The two met up in Kinshasa on May 21, 2021, and remained together until July 12, when Lorenzo flew back to Belgium. The area where they conducted their research primarily centred around the Province of Mai-Ndombe (in an ecoregion defined as “forest-savanna mosaic”). Specifically, they worked in the provincial capital Inongo, in a number of hunter-gatherer villages NE of Inongo, namely Bobangi-Sept, Douze, Quinze and Bolingo-Trentesept, and finally in Nioki.
The stays in Kinshasa allowed Lorenzo and Jean-Pierre to fill up on fieldwork paraphernalia, arrange meetings with local scholars, relevant political figures and members of local Twa communities. They were also paramount in establishing first contacts with collaborators in Inongo and Nioki, in organising a conference at the ISP Gombe, and in planning long-term research strategy proposals with several colleagues in the DRC.
While out in the field, the team focussed on acoustic data collection, saliva sampling for molecular anthropological research, organising conferences at the local ISPs, and furthering contacts with the local Twa communities. Data were collected on more than 20 language varieties, with special focus on Sakata (esp. Kingingia, Kinzinzale, Kingingele, Kitere, Kibayi), Mpe, Nunu, North Boma, Nunu Bobangi, and several Lotwa varieties. As for BantUGent’s collaboration with Uppsala’s Human Evolution Programme within the Department of Organismal Biology, saliva samples were also collected and then shipped to Sweden.
The research perspectives for this fieldwork mission are extremely promising. For a phonetician and phonologist, the Mai-Ndombe represents a fruitful field of enquiry, as a number of arguably uncommon phenomena can be found there. The first analytical steps should be oriented towards: (i) retroflex consonants in North Boma, Nunu, and, to a lesser extent, Mpe; (ii) Sakata labial-velars; and (iii) Lotwa trill/retroflex consonants. Subsequent steps include: phonological descriptions of the sound systems at hand, wider-range acoustic surveys of the same sounds, aerodynamic and articulatory studies.
From April 16 to June 16, 2021, Guy Kouarata carried out a BantuFirst fieldwork mission in the territories of Mbandaka, Maluku, Kwamouth, and Kinshasa of the DRC and in the area north of Brazzaville in Congo. His mission had two main objectives:
The linguistic fieldwork was guided by the linguistic map of Teke varieties below, which Sara Pacchiarotti established through a thorough literature review.
In the end, Guy collected comparative lists of 650 words in 11 different Teke varieties, i.e. Tswaara, Kisi-Nzali, Kitiimi, Kinkuu, Bakikimi, Kikaan, Esinginyi, Engungwel, Ibua-yuo, Ibuu-mbakana and the variety of Boku. He first traveled by car from Kinshasa to the towns of Mbakana, Yuo and Boku in the DRC. However, due to the poor road conditions and engine failures, he went back to Kinshasa and continued his journey by boat using the river network to reach Nkaana, Ibali, Bokala, Ngandambo, Ngaliem and Camp Bankuu, all in the DRC. Back again in Kinshasa, he crossed the Congo River to take the Brazzaville-Ngo road, then Ngo-Mpuya before crossing the river again to reach the locality of Tshumbiri in the DRC. On his return, taking advantage of his proximity to the town of Gamboma, he also collected Engunwel data. Back in Brazzaville, he also gathered Kidondo data for ongoing research by Heidi Goes and Koen Bostoen (BantUGent).
The collection of genetic data involves taking saliva samples from the speech communities targeted. Hair, fingernails and saliva are the keys to a person’s life in Africa. Whoever owns one of these owns your life. Convincing people to donate saliva is therefore not easy, even less in a pandemic when there is much speculation and rumor. Guy therefore had to create awareness by explaining well the scientific purposes of the interdisciplinary BantuFirst research. The sensitization campaign involved the close assistance of local chiefs, pastors, and other opinion leaders. In the end, through 9 sampling sessions, Guy succeeded with the help of his assistants in obtaining 597 samples in total, 246 from women and 351 from men.
Map of Guy’s fieldwork locations (© Sara Pacchiarotti)
Map of Teke varieties of the DRC (© Sara Pacchiarotti)
PhD student Heidi Goes talked about her research on the Kikongo Language Cluster (West-Coastal Bantu) and her fieldwork in Cabinda on June 20, 2021, as part of a lecture series organized by the Australian Esperanto Association. Her talk is available on Youtube
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On June 17, 2021, at 3.30 pm, Koen Bostoen presents a talk titled “Retrieving lost paths in the rainforest after population collapse in Congo rainforest from 400 CE” at the online ASCL Seminar in Leiden.
During the 10th World Congress of African Linguistics (June 7-12, 2021), organized online by Leiden University, Lorenzo Maselli, Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen presented two papers with original language data collected in the West-Coastal Bantu homeland: one titled “Phonetic and laboratory phonological research on hunter-gatherer substrate interference in the West-Coastal Bantu homeland region: Some preliminary results” and one titled “On the origin of verb-final subject indexes in Ngwi (West-Coastal Bantu, DRC)“. Recordings of both talks are available on the conference platform.
Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen present their ongoing research on the the poorly described West-Coastal Bantu language Ngwi at the 8th International Conference on Bantu Languages, which is held online at the University of Essex, UK, 2-4th June 2021. Their pre-recorded talk “The Vowel System of Ngwi (Bantu, B861, DRC)” is available here. It includes original fieldwork data, which they collected in Idiofa in 2019.
Daily Science, the science magazine of the Belgian federal government, covers our research on the population collapse in the Congo rainforest with an article titled “Une étude archéologique relance le débat sur l’Histoire des langues africaines“.
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On May 27, Koen Bostoen & Joseph Koni Muluwa present a talk titled “The Immediate Before Verb Focus Position in West-Coastal Bantu: Some Comparative Data” during the online workshop on Typological Perspectives on Focus Marking in African Languages convened by Mena Lafkioui at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. The progam is available here.
On May 26, 2021, BantUGent and the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in Tokyo (Japan) have the second kick-off meeting of their FWO-JSPS-funded collaborative project on “The Past and Present of Bantu Languages: Integrating Micro-Typology, Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Lexicography“. It also covers BantuFirst research.
The meeting is online. The Zoom link to participate can be obtained via koen.bostoen@ugent.be upon request.
9:30-9:40: Opening remarks
9:45-11:15: The first session
9:45-10:15 Koen Bostoen: “Suffixal phrasemes in Bantu verbal derivation”
10:15-10:45 Nobuko Yoneda: “Properties of the subject in Bantu languages”
10:45-11:15 Minah Nabirye: “Information Structure in Lusoga: New Corpus-based Research”
11:15-11:30 Coffee
11:30-13:00: The second session
11:30-12:00 Daisuke Shinagawa: “Morphosyntactic local variation in Chaga”
12:00-12:30 Gilles-Maurice de Schryver: “Bantu lexicography in Asia”
12:30-13:00 General discussion about the project’s research agenda
