He @volkskrant.nl, promovendi hebben ook namen, zelfs als het vrouwen zijn

I'll be talking in this HAAM-Radio webinar on "Advances in reconstructing past demography, interactions, and social organisation in Africa", 28 January 2026, 15:00 CET. Register for the Zoom link if you want to hear the latest on African population history: haam-community.github.io/events/2025/...

Vijfjarige, op weg naar de supermarkt: "Six-seven!" Random boomer: "Hé, hij kan in het Engels tellen!"

I've been reading this to my five year old with an alveolar click for three nights now. So far he's replacing it with a velar stop but I will persevere

Trying to type !Xoon/Taa in Excel is really breaking my keyboard, my Excel file, and my will to live.

Xanuka /||anuka/ all the way

The semester is done! The students in the linguistic fieldwork class were ready for a party, it seems

CALL FOR COLLABORATORS The MapLE project is looking for 5 collaborators working on African languages, to collect and analyse data on the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge in grammar. Will you join our project? See the website for details: epistemicity.net/call-collabo...

✨New issue alert (Vol 34, No 3)!✨ As always, NJAS is fully free and #OpenAccess. Check it out now! ⬇️⬇️⬇️ njas.fi/njas/issue/v...

Come join us in Ghent next year for #Bantu11! The first cfp is out, with workshop proposals due October 15th (the next deadline will be December 1st for abstract submissions, which can be to a workshop or the general session) www.bantugent.ugent.be/bantu11/

"She was living in her Updown world"

Click insertions in the wild (thread)

Share your favourite words, etymologies, idioms, proverbs and riddles in African languages! stemmenvanafrika.nl/contact/

Who invented wine glasses? Who designed the most instable type of glass and said right, let's put the stuff that make you clumsy in it

Subtle (and not so subtle) racism in old (and not so old) publications on South African languages: a thread

Why is it always "my collaborators don't speak English" and never "I don't speak isiZulu"? (from Corrigan et al. 2011, "Ethnobotanical plant uses in the KwaNibela Peninsula, St Lucia, South Africa", South African Journal of Botany 77: 346-359)

Auer (1977: 459) reconstructs the word *ngamote 'room' to Proto-Sotho, whose perfect regularity clearly proves that Afrikaans contact predated the break-up of Proto-Sotho. 🙃

Metalinguistic data only it's data about which linguists hate each other, which linguists are married to each other, etc.

No Turnitin, the student did not "swap letters with similar characters from another alphabet". They're called phonetic symbols

How many South African place names are relics from languages that are no longer spoken there? Well, since 15% of recorded place names don't have an etymology in a known South African language, my guess is close to 15%.

I just read and graded a thesis in less time than it took Turnitin to check it for plagiarism, but please, do tell me about how AI will make humans obsolete.

I have two review speeds: right away and never.

Came across three versions of a Xhosa children's song played while counting the fingers in the Greater Xhosa Dictionary. Version three is a bit disturbing:

New data! The origin of Sesotho click words: osf.io/txp87/files/...

Why does every noun change into an adjective-modified noun phrase? "Urban spaces" instead of "cities", "female bodies" instead of "women", "linguistic codes" instead of "languages"...

I gave a talk about noun class assignment of non-Bantu loans in Bantu languages at the LUCL Brainstorm on Gender and Nominal Classification yesterday (www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/events/2025/...). Slides and handout are here: osf.io/ar7uv/files/...

📣Publicly available dataset: Khoisan loanword database Freely available here: osf.io/6gk3m/

Er is nog nooit een Ugandese paus geweest, maar dat wil niet zeggen dat de paus in Uganda geen rol speelt - tot de taalkunde aan toe! Op Stemmen van Afrika legt Jenneke van der Wal uit waarom de paus een doorslaggevende rol kan spelen in taalkundig onderzoek: stemmenvanafrika.nl/een-eekhoorn...

One of my more obscure hobbies is pronouncing words that aren't Bantu as if they are Bantu. Today: Megalake Makgadikgadi (mɪ-χalake ma-kxadikxadi) is obviously a Tswana class 4 word

1970's South African linguistics: Mr Volschenk, Mr ǁowaseb and Mr Satyo are all mentioned, but only Mr Volschenk is prasied for his kindness and excellence

📣New paper: "Inheritance and contact in the development of lateral obstruents in Nguni languages", by Nina van der Vlugt & me, based on her MA thesis research. Now out open access: www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/10...

‘We died the day we left the forests’ - join us for this online lecture by prof Saudah Namyalo on documenting the lost heritage of the Basua (Uganda) 20 May, register for the zoom link

📣New dataset published: a comparative database of auxiliaries in Southern Bantu languages (with Matilda Carbo & Thera Marie Crane) doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

🌟New issue alert (Vol 34, No 1)!🌟 As always, NJAS is fully free and #OpenAccess. Check it out now! ⬇️⬇️⬇️ njas.fi/njas/issue/v...

It is weirdly embarrassing how often I, a linguist, misspell the words "languages"

Yes I started a new paper instead of working on my half-finished papers. It's called radical self-care

📣New paper: "Yeyi: A phylogenetic loner in Eastern Bantu" Joint work with Natalia Chousou-Polydouri and Koen Bostoen, available here: doi.org/10.3390/lang...

Online Masterclass in Epistemicity (Sept-Nov 2025)! The MapLE project organises an online course on epistemicity: the expression of the speaker’s and hearer’s knowledge in the grammar. See the website for more information and how to apply!

The baby is so sexist. He won't let me work but he is fine with me cleaning the kitchen

Dr. Livingstone complaining about being taught "uncouth" Setswana (cited in Irvine 2008, Subject words: African linguistics and the colonial encounter)

Call for papers: Auxiliary verb constructions in Bantu languages (special issue of Nordic Journal of African Studies) Full call: njas.fi/njas/announc... @njas.fi

Oh sure, when Jane Austen does it it's world class literature, but when I do it I need to "use proper citations"

Periodic reminder: ALT has a page that lists a substantial number of open-access grammars of languages around the world: linguistic-typology.org/grammarwatch...

38 words for "to drip" in the Zulu dictionary, 19 of them have a click (versus +- 22% of click words in the lexicon in general). Sound symbolism is strong with this one

Allen Asiimwe and I made a video with the basics of tone transcription and analysis: youtu.be/KqrlX2Xjh7g?...

Everything can be a minimal pair if your transcription is bad enough.

I wonder what kind of vowel hiatus resolution strategy is applied when you systematically write hiatus as haitus

A few years ago, I taught "Introduction: Languages and Cultures of Africa", and this year I teach "Culture and Language: Africa", and it's weird how these two courses have almost nothing to do with each other.

I used a neural network approach (my brain) to develop a predictive model (squinting at the data) that yielded robust conclusions (vibes)

Applications open for this course for East African linguists, convened by UNA Europa colleagues in Edinburgh, Helsinki, Kampala and Leiden: www.una-europa.eu/calendar/onl...