This Inaugural Lecture by Professor Lutz Marten (Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa) entitled "Linguistic Variation, Language Contact and the New Comparative Bantu" was given at SOAS, University of London on 18 April 2013.

Synopsis: Bantu languages are the most well-known group of African languages with a scholarly tradition dating back to the 17th century. Yet despite longstanding efforts, an internal classification of Bantu languages into distinct sub-groups has not been established. This lecture sketches a different way of looking at the relation between Bantu languages by focussing on structural properties, morphosyntactic comparison and an explanation which involves the use of many Bantu languages in multilingual contexts.

Further information about this event: http://bit.ly/WEPKh9
Further information about the Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa at SOAS, University of London: http://www.soas.ac.uk/africa/
Further information about the Department of the Linguistics at SOAS, University of London: http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/


Biography: Lutz Marten is Professor of General and African Linguistics and holds a joint appointment in SOAS's departments of Linguistics and African Languages and Cultures. His work focuses on the linguistic description and analysis of Bantu languages such as Bemba, Herero and Swahili, and he has conducted several fieldwork projects in Namibia, Tanzania and Zambia. He is particularly interested in the relation between structural aspects of language and the dimensions of meaning and use in which they are embedded.