Professor Lutz Marten

Lutz Marten is Professor of General and African Linguistics at SOAS University of London. He is interested in how language is structured and used, how languages differ and change over time, and how language is linked to culture, society, history, nature and other domains of human life. Most of his work is related to African languages and he has worked with researchers and communities across the continent for many years.

He joined SOAS in 1993 as a student in the MA in Linguistics programme, having studied English language and literature, philosophy and African studies at the University of Hamburg before that. After a short spell at Zanzibar’s Taasisi ya Kiswahili na Lugha za Kigeni (Institute for Swahili and Foreign Languages, now part of the State University of Zanzibar), he returned to SOAS in 1995 for his PhD which was awarded in 1999 for a dissertation on underspecification in verbal interpretation (published in 2002 as At the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface)

He served as Head of the Department of Linguistics, Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures, UK-Director of the London Confucius Institute, and as Head of the SOAS Doctoral School. He was involved in developing SOAS’s Language Strategy and in setting up SOAS’s Language for Lockdown series during Covid-19. He is Founding Chair of the International Conference on Bantu Linguistics and currently serves as the President of the Philological Society, the oldest UK learned society dedicated to the study of language.

He has held visiting positions at a number of universities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, including at the Languages of Tanzania Project (LOT) of the University Dar es Salaam, as an A W Mellon Visiting Fellow of the Centre for African Language Diversity at University of Cape Town, as research fellow at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Africa and Asia (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and as a guest lecturer at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

His research interests are in comparative and historical linguistics, language variation and change, and questions of language, society and identity, as well as in formal linguistics and linguistic theory (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, formal models of interpretation – in particular Dynamic Syntax). 

Most of his work focuses on African languages of Eastern and Southern Africa, in particular Bantu languages such as Swahili, Bemba, and Herero. From 2015-2018 he led a Leverhulme-funded major research project on ‘Morphosyntactic Variation in Bantu: Typology, contact and change’ and he was involved in a recently completed project on Variation in Swahili, led by Hannah Gibson. He is also working with Jimmy Kihara, Clara Momanyi and others on a British Academy-funded project on the description of Kenyan Bantu language Kitaveta, and he is involved in a British Academy Writing Workshop on Eroding Dichotomies: Description, Analysis and Publishing in African Linguistics. During Covid-19 he was part of a project, with Nana-Sato Rossberg, on the study of the translation and interpretation of Covid-19 among London’s multilingual communities. 

His recent publications include the co-edited monumental Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages (2025) and, with Nana Sato-Rossberg, Languages, Cultures, and Health in a Global City: Translating and Communicating Covid-19 Among London’s Multilingual Communities (2026).

Inaugural Lecture

Professor Lutz Marten's Inaugural Lecture: Linguistic Variation, Language Contact and the New Comparative Bantu