Hilde Gunnink
Linguist, focusing on African languages. FWO postdoctoral researcher @UGent || Linguistics teacher @Leiden
[ˈhɪlˠdə ˈχønɪŋk]
- "Wil je macaroni?" "Nee, maca-NIET-roni!"
- Zulu is such a perfect language
- He @volkskrant.nl, promovendi hebben ook namen, zelfs als het vrouwen zijn
- I'll be talking in this HAAM-Radio webinar on "Advances in reconstructing past demography, interactions, and social organisation in Africa", 28 January 2026, 15:00 CET. Register for the Zoom link if you want to hear the latest on African population history: haam-community.github.io/events/2025/...
- Vijfjarige, op weg naar de supermarkt: "Six-seven!" Random boomer: "Hé, hij kan in het Engels tellen!"
- I've been reading this to my five year old with an alveolar click for three nights now. So far he's replacing it with a velar stop but I will persevere
- Trying to type !Xoon/Taa in Excel is really breaking my keyboard, my Excel file, and my will to live.
- Xanuka /||anuka/ all the way
- The semester is done! The students in the linguistic fieldwork class were ready for a party, it seems
- Reposted by Hilde GunninkCALL FOR COLLABORATORS The MapLE project is looking for 5 collaborators working on African languages, to collect and analyse data on the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge in grammar. Will you join our project? See the website for details: epistemicity.net/call-collabo...
- Reposted by Hilde Gunnink[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Hilde Gunnink[Not loaded yet]
- "She was living in her Updown world"
- Click insertions in the wild (thread)
- Share your favourite words, etymologies, idioms, proverbs and riddles in African languages! stemmenvanafrika.nl/contact/
- Who invented wine glasses? Who designed the most instable type of glass and said right, let's put the stuff that make you clumsy in it
- Subtle (and not so subtle) racism in old (and not so old) publications on South African languages: a thread
- Why is it always "my collaborators don't speak English" and never "I don't speak isiZulu"? (from Corrigan et al. 2011, "Ethnobotanical plant uses in the KwaNibela Peninsula, St Lucia, South Africa", South African Journal of Botany 77: 346-359)
- Auer (1977: 459) reconstructs the word *ngamote 'room' to Proto-Sotho, whose perfect regularity clearly proves that Afrikaans contact predated the break-up of Proto-Sotho. 🙃
- Metalinguistic data only it's data about which linguists hate each other, which linguists are married to each other, etc.
- No Turnitin, the student did not "swap letters with similar characters from another alphabet". They're called phonetic symbols
- How many South African place names are relics from languages that are no longer spoken there? Well, since 15% of recorded place names don't have an etymology in a known South African language, my guess is close to 15%.
- I just read and graded a thesis in less time than it took Turnitin to check it for plagiarism, but please, do tell me about how AI will make humans obsolete.
- I have two review speeds: right away and never.
- Came across three versions of a Xhosa children's song played while counting the fingers in the Greater Xhosa Dictionary. Version three is a bit disturbing:
- New data! The origin of Sesotho click words: osf.io/txp87/files/...
- Why does every noun change into an adjective-modified noun phrase? "Urban spaces" instead of "cities", "female bodies" instead of "women", "linguistic codes" instead of "languages"...
