Zurich Workshop on Afrikaans Linguistics

Joint event by the Departement of German and English Linguistics

Context

In October 2021, Zurich university organises a workshop on the linguistics of Afrikaans that will be the culmination of an entire year devoted to this interesting language, which will feature linguistic seminars as well as language courses. It is the first event ever in Zurich solely dedicated to Afrikaans linguistics. With over seven million native speakers, predominantly in southern Africa, Afrikaans is the fifth largest Germanic language. Although important work has been done regarding the history and the social and political aspects of Afrikaans, the study of its structure is still relatively uncharted territory especially compared to that of related languages.

This workshop aims to show that Afrikaans lends itself to interesting insights for theoretical linguistics and to bring together experts from southern Africa, the Low Countries and elsewhere in front of a Zurich audience. Four plenary talks will be held by experts on Afrikaans and its theoretical implications. A further set of workshop sessions will be available for more contributions. The workshop will be concluded by a round table session. The plenary speakers are:

• Jenny Audring (Leiden University)
• Theresa Biberauer (University of Cambridge)
• Andries Coetzee (University of Michigan)
• Timothy Colleman (Ghent University)

To allow for people from all backgrounds to be introduced to the merit of Afrikaans as a subject for linguistic theory, the working language will be English. 

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