Schedule 75. StuTS

Murakaza neza

The East African Bantu language Kinyarwanda is the national language of Rwanda. It is also spoken in the border regions of the neighboring countries Uganda, DR Congo and Tanzania. Altogether around 12 million speak the language. After an eventful history especially in the 20th century (colonial rule, independence, ethnic conflicts, genocide 1994) Rwanda became one of fastest and most sustainable developing countries in Africa.

After a short introduction to the sociolinguistic reality of Rwanda we will explore in this workshop some central linguistic features on different levels (phonetics, morpho-phonemics, verb and noun morphology) prototypical for Kinyarwanda as a Bantu language.
By using video and audio recordings collected between 2017–2024 in Rwanda we will try to get a first glimpse at the language. The participants will hear, watch, read and linguistically interpret the language material and use their skills to discover and describe potentially pretty different structures compared to the Indo-European languages that are so familiar to us.

Furthermore we will take a look at animal communication as an instance of interactives in order to better understand language as a tool of social interaction in Rwanda.

There will be also enough time for all of YOUR questions about anything you want to know, for example about fieldwork in the region, about Rwanda in general, language politics or language contact.

Info

Day: 2024-05-10
Start time: 09:15
Duration: 01:00
Room: Shark (33.0.010)
Track: Other
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar

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