Investigating Grammatical Variation in Swahili

This talk explores issues involved in investigating dialectal variation in Swahili. We report on a new collaborative project ‘Grammatical variation in Swahili: contact, change and identity’ which seeks to explore factors involved in present-day variation in Swahili. Dialectal variation in Swahili, particularly in relation to phonology and morphology, has long been noted (e.g. Bakari 1985, Stigand 1915). However, there has been little attention paid to structural variation. We are also interested in investigating the relationship between dialectal variation and language contact to better understand how multilingualism and language use affect variation in present-day Swahili.
This project is set against the backdrop of existing syntax dialect projects and microvariation projects on a range of other languages (e.g. Scots - Smith et al. 2019, Dutch - Barbiers et al. 2005, isiXhosa - Bloom Ström 2017, etc.). The talk will explore how we may be able to draw on these projects and their methodologies, as well as the challenges specific to the Swahili context.