Explorations in Language Variation: Swahili and Beyond

Swahili is a major East African lingua franca spoken by more than 100 million people across a large geographical area and several international borders. As a result, Swahili is spoken by diverse communities in a wide range of socio-cultural contexts and there is considerable dialectal variation.

In this workshop we explore different aspects of this variation, drawing on different places where Swahili is spoken, and we place variation in Swahili in the wider context of language variation in Africa and beyond.