African languages - research
Traditionally, research within African Languages at the University of Gothenburg has mainly focused on under-described and threatened Bantu languages, both from a linguistic (grammatical), as well as a sociolinguistic point of view. Present research focuses on Bantu languages in Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania, as well as Somali in Ethiopia and Somalia.
As the only university in Scandinavia, University of Gothenburg maintains the academic discipline ‘African Languages’, covering both research and education (leading to an MA or a PhD).
To a large extent, the research is based on fieldwork, and all the members of the research group have extensive experience of elicitation and documentation techniques, but also corpus linguistic methods are applied.
Presentations
At the Department of Languages and Literatures, African Languages contributes to the research area Linguistic Structures*.
The results of the research within the discipline is also regularly presented at several international conferences and in peer reviewed publications. More detailed information can be found through the following links to the web pages of the individual researchers.
Researchers
Morgan Nilsson, Senior Lecturer
Somali; prosody; gender, number, agreement; tense, aspect, mode, taxis; standardisation, regional variation; corpora; grammaticography, lexicography.
Malin Petzell, Professor
Bantu languages, language description (documentation and analysis), nominal and verbal morphosyntax, aspectual classification of verbs, valency, tense/aspect/mood, language endangerment, and field methods.
Employed at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science
(previously researcher and presently teacher at the Dept. of Languages and Literatures):