The Swahili Dialects Project
The Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Grammatical variation in Swahili: contact, change and identity’ is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Essex (UK), the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), SOAS University of London (UK) and Kenyatta University (Kenya) which explores morphosyntactic variation in Swahili. The project explores dialectal variation in the Bantu language Swahili and is structured around three strands and investigates: 1) present-day morphosyntactic variation found in Swahili, 2) the role played by language contact with both Bantu and non-Bantu languages in the variation attested, and 3) the relationship between this structural variation and speaker identity.
Spoken by more than 100 million people across East Africa, Swahili has long played a crucial role as a regional lingua franca. Swahili is spoken by diverse speech communities often in highly multilingual contexts. At the heart of our project is therefore also the development of an appropriate methodology for the examination of structural variation in Swahili, which centres multilingualism and speakers’ dynamic linguistic repertoires. Building on methodologies from dialectology, microvariation, and sociolinguistic studies of language attitudes and perception, the project contributes to an improved understanding of morphosyntactic variation in Swahili, as well as to broadening of scholarship on language variation by centering a major African lingua franca.