Participation in conference on evidentiality in Macao and lecture on Lingala at the University of Hong Kong (HKU)

In November 2025, Antonia Fendt and Nico Nassenstein went on a week-long conference trip to Macau and Hong Kong. From November 15 to 16, the 3rd Conference on Evidentiality and Its Related Categories took place at the University of Macau. In their presentation "The expression of evidentiality in Central Africa: Evidence from Bantu-based contact languages", the two speakers focused on the expression of evidentiality - i.e. the (grammatical) marking of information sources - in Bantu-based contact languages of Central Africa. The talk laid an important grammatical foundation for Antonia Fendt's further investigation, which focuses specifically on grammatical structures in the context of diffuse political messages. For example, the deliberate omission of evidentiality markers can contribute to communicating political content in song lyrics in an indirect, ambiguous or not clearly verifiable way. Following the conference, Antonia Fendt and Nico Nassenstein accepted an invitation from Prof. Kofi Yakpo to give a lecture as part of the Linguistics Seminar at the University of Hong Kong. Under the title "Researching the contact language Lingala in the margins: From Brazza to Cabinda and Rwanda", they presented current research on the contact and distribution history of Lingala.