This activity was organized in close collaboration with the Academy of Finland-financed project "Stability and Change in Language Contact: The Case of Southern Ndebele (South Africa)" (Eteläafrikkalainen ndebelen kieli: muutos, pysyvyys ja kielikontaktit), with local counterparts in South Africa especially at the Dept of African languages at UNISA (University of South Africa) and CALDi - the Centre for African language diversity.
The more experienced researchers and teachers that took part on the trip were:
Lotta Aunio (African studies)
Thera Crane (African studies, Ndebele project)
Stephan Schulz (African studies, Ndebele project)
Riikka Länsisalmi (Japanese Studies)
Matti Miestamo (General Linguistics)
Riho Grünthal (Finno-Ugric)
Axel Fleisch (African studies)
There were 14 students on the trip, so overall 23 participants travelled from Helsinki to South Africa from 8-28 May 2016.
Our five main areas of study during the trip were:
(1) Linguistic Anthropology (and Psycholinguistics)
(2) Morphology and Syntax
(3) Language ideologies and linguistic biographies
(4) Data processing and computation
(5) Phonetics, Phonology, Prosody
The excursion had two main objectives: 1) for the participants to gain substantial expertise as to linguistic fieldwork skills, while 2) making a contribution to the linguistic documentation and analysis of the target languages and their sociolinguistic situation. While the first objective was succesfully reached during the trip, the second will be realized during the year 2017 by publishing our research findings as a thematic article volume in the series Studia Orientalia.
Thematic travel reports (in Finnish, but including lots of pictures) from during the trip can be found in our travel blog.