Mapping Languages: Working with Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, and Tshiluba Speakers in the GTA

The aim of this working group is to bring together researchers from different subdisciplines of linguistics and scholars from the Humanities and Social Sciences with members of the Bantu speaking African diaspora living in Toronto and the GTA. Through meetings with representatives of community organizations from a selected group of countries from the African Great Lakes region, that is, Burundi, The Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, our goal is to establish long-lasting and meaningful partnerships and to lay the basis for establishing the University of Toronto as a local center for the study of Bantu languages as they are spoken in the diaspora. Our goal is to map communities of speakers of three African languages (Niger-Congo, Bantu) spoken in the GTA, that is, Kirundi, Kinyarwanda and Tshiluba, and eventually to conduct sociolinguistic surveys with members of these communities.

Leads

  • Suzi Lima, A&S Linguistics
  • Fatima Hamlaoui, A&S French
  • Juvénal Ndayiragije, UTSC Language Studies

Members

Graduate Students, University of Toronto

  • Adriana Williams, OISE
  • Colin Keith-Hill, UofT Linguistics
  • Júlia Schulz Walber, UofT Linguistics
  • Liah Yared, UofT Linguistics
  • Mikayla Oliver,  UofT Linguistics
  • Patrick Kinchsular, UofT Linguistics