Workshop, advisory board meeting and team meeting at the University of Essex in May/June 2024

Workshop, advisory board meeting and team meeting at the University of Essex in May/June 2024

On the 31st of May we held our final project workshop on microvariation and youth language practices at the University of Essex, where all of our team members gave talks on our research topics (see program) . We presented our research findings to students and staff of the Universities of Essex and London and had stimulating discussions on morphosyntactic variation, sociolinguistic aspects and naming practices of youth languages in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the DR Congo, Malawi and Zambia.

Workshop program

In the afternoon we held our hybrid advisory board meeting and updated our colleagues on the progress of our project and various findings from our field research. The advice and perspectives shared by our advisory board members constituted a valuable contribution to our ongoing reflections on microvariation and youth language practices in multilingual settings in the Bantu-speaking area. Finally, we also discussed our ongoing collaborative work on the question “what is innovation” which we had started at our last project meeting in Mainz in 2022. The collaboratively-written paper on this topic is taking shape and will be one of the outcomes of the project.
The second day of our meeting in Essex was dedicated to our project team meeting and intensive writing and editorial work on our publication projects. During this very productive day, we made great progress especially with our collaborative monograph on microvariation and youth language practices in Africa. After spending the whole day writing and discussing, we concluded the day by a walk along the River Colne which runs through the beautiful surroundings of the University of Essex Campus.