Maarten Mous - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Maarten Mous

Journal of Linguistics and Language in Education, Jun 30, 2022

The article is a plea for sustaining the indigenous languages of Tanzania and Kenya. These langua... more The article is a plea for sustaining the indigenous languages of Tanzania and Kenya. These languages display an impressive richness in diversity which is diminishing currently. It is important to appreciate the value of the current linguistic diversity and that of multilingualism. The article is based on a presentation at a conference of the Languages of Tanzania project and hence is biased towards the Tanzanian situation. I argue that the success of the language policy of promoting Kiswahili now opens the ways to support the local languages that pose no threat to national unity. Given that this article is a plea and one making ample use of my personal experiences of linguistic research in Tanzania and Kenya the style is more personal and lacks the usual detachment of academic papers.

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2017

Event number is an important grammatical category in Konso in addition to nominal number. Event n... more Event number is an important grammatical category in Konso in addition to nominal number. Event number has two main values, singular and plural, which can be expressed by two distinct verbal morphological processes, punctual and pluractional. The interpretation of a sentence in terms of event number is arrived at through an intricate interplay of lexical meaning, the core meaning of the number marking morphology and the separate system of aspect. Each verb has its intrinsic values for event number associated with its systematic lexical distinctions in terms of event number. Event number includes both event internal and event external situations. The meaning of the markers of singular and plural event number has a primary and a secondary value. There are several situations in which the primary meaning is excluded and the secondary meaning is the only possible interpretation. The pluractional is fully productive while the punctual is not productive and has interesting structural morph...

Language is one of the strongest expressions of group identity. Many communities in East Africa a... more Language is one of the strongest expressions of group identity. Many communities in East Africa are multilingual and for some of the smaller communities this leads to language loss and for others to language revival. The article shows how different groups in similar circumstances opt for different linguistic behaviour and how these choices can swiftly change in the light of external circumstances including economic need. The article examines the linguistic attitude of groups such as the Yaaku, Aasa, Akiek, Ma’a/Mbugu from East Africa and compares them among each other and with other former hunter-gatherers such as the Bakola/Bagyele pygmies in Cameroon and the agricultural Mbugwe from Tanzania who are equally small in numbers.

The current dimensions in the typology of tone are not insightful for understanding the propertie... more The current dimensions in the typology of tone are not insightful for understanding the properties of tone in Cushitic languages. Some Cushitic languages are characterised as “pitch accent”, but these cannot be considered stress languages because the criterion of obligatoriness of every word having a stressed unit is not valid for them. In Hyman’s (2006) typology, these languages are (restricted) tone languages. Pitch as prominence marker does show the stress-like tendencies of culminativity and demarcation in these languages, which is why the label “pitch accent” has been suggested. The tone properties are better explained by another dimension, namely the fact that the distinctive function of tone hardly plays a role at the lexical level but does play a role at the grammatical level.

The mixed language debate: theoretical and empirical …, 2003

... for a walk (3) mxatu tree, afterbirth mti tree, afterbirth hluku to drop, give birth gwisha t... more ... for a walk (3) mxatu tree, afterbirth mti tree, afterbirth hluku to drop, give birth gwisha to drop, give birth hi to sew, mould chuma to sew ... In the hlonipha register of respect the Zulu word for'sky', izulu is replaced by the archaic word ibinga (Van Rooyen 1968: 42) In the Iraqw register ...

Object Positions in Benue-Kwa, 1997

baallconference.linguist.univ-paris- …

... 1999. Somali. (London Oriental and African Language Library, 10.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ... more ... 1999. Somali. (London Oriental and African Language Library, 10.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Treis, Yvonne 2008. A Grammar of Kambaata Part 1: Phonology, Nominal Morphology, Non-Verbal Predication. (Kuschitischen Sprachstudien, 26). Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. ...

pre publication version in pdf, 2002

Anthropological linguistics, 2004

Abstract. Youths in several urban centers on the African continent are continuously creating thei... more Abstract. Youths in several urban centers on the African continent are continuously creating their own languages in order to set themselves apart from the older generation. These languages also serve to bridge ethnic differences. Cases have been reported for Abidjan, Nairobi, ...

Anthropological Linguistics, 2010