2024
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28 June 2024
As part of a special webinar organised by the University of the Free State (South Africa) in celebration of Lesotho's Bicentennial, we were invited to present our research on siPhuthi in a talk entitled "From grassroots initiatives to the official recognition of siPhuthi in Lesotho and South Africa". |
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7 June 2024
I was invited to give a talk on Kroondal German at the University of Trento (Italy). |
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11 April 2024
Hot off the press: Our book on the South African German variety, Kroondal German, is out! It is open access and free to download here. Supporting sound files can be accessed here. |
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18 March 2024
Our article on the importance of collaboration between speakers and linguists in language documentation, published in the 2022 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL), has been featured in Scientia. Scientia adapts academic papers into accessible, magazine-style articles for the general public. Read the Scientia adaptation here and our original ARAL article here. |
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2023
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23 November 2023
I received the TU Dortmund teaching prize IDEAward (Inclusion Diversity Education Award) for the seminar 'Endangered Languages', taught in the Winter semester 22/23. |
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11 October 2023
I delivered a plenary lecture on Kroondal German during the German Abroad 5 conference. This biennial conference focuses on extraterritorial varieties of German worldwide and took place in Eichstätt and Munich. |
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25 May 2023
Alice Mitchell (University of Cologne) and I gave a talk entitled "Die Sprachen Afrikas in 60 Minuten" to the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband. In this talk, we presented the linguistically fascinating and diverse continent and its languages. |
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17 January 2023
DocuAfrica has been launched! This new platform features short documentaries of personal accounts on experiences and desires from various African perspectives. Watch our first DocuAfrica film EbaPhuthi sive lesihle ('The beautiful Phuthi nation') here. |
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2022
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17 March 2022
It's all about collaboration! Our article on the importance of collaboration between speakers and linguists in language documentation work is out in this year's Social Justice themed Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Written by an L1 siPhuthi speaker and two linguists, with abstracts in four languages: siPhuthi, Sesotho, isiXhosa and English. Read our paper here. |
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21 February 2022
On the occasion of International Mother Language Day, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on safeguarding languages around the world, with a focus on Africa, at an event organised by the United Nations Office in Geneva. Click here to hear the discussions. |
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11 January 2022
We trained six ebaPhuthi in language documentation methods in Lesotho in November 2021. Read our blog post here. |
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2021
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15 September 2021
Together with fellow ELDP grantees Jakob Lesage and Katherine Bolaños, we discussed how we redesigned our language documentation projects during the COVID-19 pandemic to adapt to remote fieldwork. Watch our presentation here. |
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9 May 2021
I have been awarded a Major Documentation Project (MDP) grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. The project "A multimedia corpus of siPhuthi" will kick off on 1 August 2021. |
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23 April 2021
The first ever children's book in N/uu has just been published by Puku Children's Literature Foundation. The folktale entitled "!Qhoi n/a Tjhoi" (Skilpad en Volstruis / Tortoise and Ostrich) is narrated by Ouma Katrina to her granddaughter, Claudia Snyman, and is written in N/uu, with Afrikaans and English translations. We were happy to support this exciting initiative as "N/uu editors". |
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19 April 2021
Hot off the press: Our chapter "We write our language" has been published in an open-access book on language revitalization by Justyna Olko and Julia Sallabank - this edited volume is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in revitalizing their language and is the result of true international collaborations between researchers from multiple fields, language speakers, and activists. Download the book for free here. |
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2020
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3 September 2020
The siPhuthi poem mma ('mother') written by siPhuthi language activist, Letzadzo Kometsi, which was then subsequently translated into English and Catalan in my paper "The struggle for language rights for Phuthi in Lesotho", has been reproduced in the Catalan bestseller "El futur del català depèn de tu" by Carme Junyent. This poem is a fictive letter from a young girl to her dead mother, in which she laments about not having grown up with siPhuthi as her "mother tongue". |
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24 June 2020
I gave a testimonial about the life and research of a Humboldtian as part of the virtual opening ceremony of the Annual Meeting of the Humboldt Foundation. I was one of two Humboldt Fellows of the Foundation chosen to speak during the Humboldtianer berichten ['Humboldtians report'] part of the programme, which also included welcome addresses by the Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Professor Pape. Watch the entire opening ceremony here (my contribution begins at 01:11:15). |
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19 June 2020
I was interviewed by Martha Tsutsui Billins of FieldNotes about community-based language documentation. Listen to the podcast episode here. |
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5 May 2020
Global problems can be solved only when we work together. In this Corona crisis and in the future. Here's a short video in German which I made for the Humboldt Foundation to make the case for international research collaboration, scientific exchange, trust and open-mindedness. #ResearchAcrossBorders |
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2019
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25 – 26 October 2019
I was invited to participate at a conference on interdisciplinary research approaches to multilingualism, language preservation and indigenous languages (Studentische Konferenz zu Interdisziplinären Forschungsansätzen zu Mehrsprachigkeit, Spracherhalt und Indigenen Sprachen) organised by students at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich. At this conference, I ran a workshop entitled "Documenting minority languages in Munich, Africa and beyond" and participated in their interdisciplinary panel discussion. |
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12 August – 11 October 2019
I was invited to spend half a semester at Truman State University (Missouri) as their Clayton B. Ofstad Writer-In-Residence. During my time at Truman State University, I taught an 8-week undergraduate course on languages on the African continent and gave a talk on endangered languages in Africa as part of the Clayton B. Ofstad Reading Series, organised by the Department of English and Linguistics, and the Global Issues Colloquium. |
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26 – 28 June 2019
I was invited to participate in the Annual Meeting of the Humboldt Foundation. Highlights of the meeting included speeches by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. More info here. |
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29 April – 4 May 2019
I had the pleasure of spending a week at the Linguistics Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, where I had the opportunity to discuss fascinating points of comparison between Texas German and Kroondal German with staff and students. As part of my visit, I gave a talk on German language varieties in rural South Africa. More info here. |
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1 – 5 April 2019
I was invited to the University of the Western Cape (South Africa) to teach a Blockseminar on linguistic fieldwork and documentation at the week-long SEcoKa Autumn School. SEcoKa (The Syntactic Ecology of Kaaps) is a three-year NRF-funded project which investigates the grammar of Kaaps as a hybrid system. More info here. |
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2018
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12 – 21 November 2018
I was invited to participate in the Linguistic Diversity Residency Programme and Workshop, hosted by Linguapax and Faber Residency of Arts, Sciences and Humanities in Olot and Barcelona, Spain, from 12-21 November 2018. More info here (residency in Olot) and here (workshop in Barcelona). |
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3 October 2018
Hot off the press: Shah, Sheena & Matthias Brenzinger (2018). The role of teaching in language revival and revitalization movements. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 38, 201-208. [pdf] |
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16 April 2018
I have been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship to spend 24 months conducting research at the University of Hamburg on the siPhuthi language spoken in Lesotho. |
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2017
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18 September 2017
Hot off the press: Seals, Corinne A. & Sheena Shah (eds.) (2017). Heritage Language Policies around the World. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. This volume brings together heritage language policy case studies from around the world, foregrounding globalization by covering five regions: the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia. The countries profiled include the United States, Canada, Argentina, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Uganda, Namibia, Morocco, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. |
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