As part of the 9th conference on Bantu languages at MUST in Blantyre, Malawi, our project team organized an interdisciplinary and versatile workshop on Youth language practices and morphosyntactic variation. Excitingly, this workshop was our first in-person meeting not only with the research team but also with most of our board members. The whole-day workshop offered a great opportunity to start our discussion on several of the common concepts of the interdisciplinary project: what is youth language? What does the category ‘youth’ mean in different sociolinguistic settings? How can the research strands of youth language practices and microvariation/morphosyntactic variation be brought together in fruitful ways? The general discussion with our project members allowed us to define some of the issues and concepts we want to examine more closely in the course of this project, such as tackling the question “what is innovation” during our next workshop in Mainz in October or organizing an internal workshop which reflects on our research methods. The eight insightful presentations given at the workshop shed light on different aspects of the morphosyntactic aspects of youth languages practices in Bantu-speaking areas of East and Southern Africa and will be published as a special issue of Linguistics Vanguard.
