De Mol moest deze aflevering zinnen uit het Swahili vertalen - daar heeft Stemmen van Afrika natuurlijk wel iets over te zeggen! En hoe zit het precies met de Kilimanjaro? #widm #widm2026 stemmenvanafrika.nl/wie-is-de-mo...

Ophef over de openingszin van The Lion King, met zelfs een rechtszaak over de vertaling, kopte de NOS. Maar hoe zit het nu met die zin, gaat het over een leeuw of een koning? (Of allebei?) @hildegunnink.bsky.social legt het uit!

I've never understood the term "monitor lizard". What is he monitoring?

Why is isiXhosa so hardcore

Wie is de mol 2026 is geland in Tanzania! En nog wel in het taalkundig meest interessante gebied, bij het Manyarameer! Lees hier wat er zo speciaal is: #widm #widm2026

Ah yes, the three things one is most likely to twirl

Glad to learn there is a Great Zimbabwe University, sad to learn their motto is not "Make Zimbabwe Great Again"

This ethical clearance for linguistic fieldwork is giving me a headache. How is this ethical. People are being harmed in the context of this research

"Wil je macaroni?" "Nee, maca-NIET-roni!"

Zulu is such a perfect language

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