This complex click has only been recorded in ideophones, and might be explained as a local innovation that reflects the widespread use of unaccompanied click sounds in paralinguistic communication. This note provides a preliminary description and interpretation of the occurrence of a nasalised dental click’ in different varieties of Digo, a Mijikenda (Northeast Coast Bantu) language spoken on both sides of the Tanzania-Kenya border. It also suggests some general correlations between island biogeography and human settlement that can be compared to observations based on research in Oceania. The evidence presented here evokes a number of historical hypotheses, some contrary to received wisdom, about the settlement of the islands and relations between the communities involved. I will argue that the significance of hunting, trapping and the translocation of wild animals has been greatly underestimated in previous histories of this region. In this paper I will make a preliminary attempt to do so, by reviewing the cultural and biological evidence for people’s interactions with the terrestrial fauna of island archipelagos that lie between East Africa and Madagascar. In the Western Indian Ocean Madagascar has been the focus of this kind of investigation (Goodman and Patterson 1997), but it has not been extended to other islands or integrated with study of their settlement histories. One particularly fertile area of research has been the historical ecology of oceanic islands and analysis of the environmental impacts of human settlement and subsistence practices (Kirch and Hunt 1997). In this and other respects the study of the maritime heritage of the Indian Ocean lags behind that of the Pacifi c, where the history of human colonisation is the subject of lively interdisciplinary debate (cf. Researchers have recently begun to re-examine the settlement of the islands of the Western Indian Ocean from multi-disciplinary perspectives that incorporate evidence from both the natural and human sciences (Blench, this volume Hurles et al. In this contribution, we aim to give an overview of current trends in the study of Swahili by analyzing processes of linguistic and scholarly diversification and variation in the Swahili-speaking world. Moreover, current (socio)linguistic trends are discussed, which mostly deal with language contact, diversity and change in touristic settings, in relation to new media, and in regard to youth language practices, or with new approaches to urban fluidity such as metrolingualism and translanguaging. These include both traditional approaches (descriptive sketches, dialectological and dialectometrical analyses, lexicostatistics etc.) and more recent directions in Bantu studies, such as micro-parametric analysis in the field of microvariation. This introductory paper intends to summarize some of the approaches and directions that address the geographical and sociolinguistic diversity of Swahili, studied from different angles. Recently, building upon earlier dialectological studies of Swahili, varieties in the periphery have been the focus of scholarly attention, as well as urban dialects from East Africa and Swahili in the diaspora. This overview paper aims to present general approaches to variation in Swahili, both from a structural/typological and from a sociolinguistic angle.
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