28: How languages influence each other - Hannah Gibson interview on Swahili, Rangi & Bantu languages

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Rift Valley area of central and northern Tanzania is the only area where languages from all four African language families are found (Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan). Languages in this area have been in contact with each other for a long time, especially in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers, so it’s a really interesting place to learn more about why and how languages influence each other. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Hannah Gibson, a Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, about her work on how word order differences between Rangi and Swahili, both Bantu languages, are related to the different languages that they’ve been in contact with. They also get enthusiastic about Bantu languages in general and especially how the famous Bantu noun class system works. (Swahili, for example, has 16 different noun classes. including humans, natural things that aren’t human, abstract nouns, places, and words that begin with ki-.) This month’s bonus episode was about naming people, a topic which has been on Lauren’s mind a lot recently! Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and over 20 previous bonus episodes. patreon.com/lingthusiasm For links to everything mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/182098995651/lingthusiasm-episode-28-how-languages-influence

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Linguisiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:21.6	I'm Lauren Gorn, and today I'm talking to Hannah Gibson about Swahili, Bantu languages and nouns.
0:27.6	Hannah, welcome to Linguisholiasm. We're very happy to have another fellow enthusiastic linguist
0:43.7	on the show today. As long as if you could introduce yourself and what your current role is.
0:50.8	Yeah, my name's Hannah Gibson, and I'm currently a lecturer at the University of Essex in the
0:56.1	UK.
0:56.7	Excellent.
0:57.6	How did you get into linguistics?
1:00.0	Ah, reluctantly, perhaps.
1:04.4	So I've always loved languages, loved learning languages.
1:08.5	I had friends who spoke different languages at school and loved learning
1:11.2	you know the odd word here or there or phrases and things and at school I learned a bit of German
1:18.1	and a bit of Spanish and then I went to university and I went to Saas so school oriental African
1:25.0	studies in London and I got there and I was supposed to be studying law.
1:29.8	Okay.
1:30.5	I got there and I found out that you could study. I think the list was like 43 different languages from around the world.
1:36.1	Yeah.
1:36.4	And I was amazed and I thought, I can't be here and not study one of these languages.
1:42.6	So I changed my studies a little bit to study Swahili in law.
1:48.2	So I had this list of languages and thought, oh, which languages I want to study? And so I studied
1:52.9	Swahili in law, really thinking, oh, I'm interested in languages, learning languages, but I'm not
1:58.1	interested in linguistics because I didn't really know perhaps what
	...

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