Goal
While there is an increased awareness of the importance of Bantu language studies for linguistic theory, most of the claims made concerning typology and universals have not included Bantu languages. Bantu languages are, in fact, one of the world’s most valuable empirical resources for the study of microvariation and have the potential to make a tremendous impact on general linguistic theory. Corpus work challenges the notions of ‘native speaker’ and ‘grammaticality’ and replaces these with a more nuanced model of gradient incidence of acceptance and occurrence, leading to a paradigm shift in the empirical foundations of linguistics. Bantu Corpus Linguistics is right at the forefront of this, and will be able to bring forward this agenda.
Methodology
As a result of a fortuitous triangle — namely existing high-level Bantu linguistic expertise, the presence of and unique input from qualified native speakers of Bantu languages, and two decades of work in Bantu language technology and corpus linguistics — the UGent is in a position to become a centre of excellence for Bantu Corpus Linguistics.