Thomas Hinnebusch - Department of Linguistics

Thomas Hinnebusch

Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and African Languages

Ph.D. 1973 UCLA

I’m from Pittsburgh PA where I grew up and received my primary, secondary, and some postgraduate education. After spending four years in Maryknoll Seminary I decided neither the priesthood nor life as a missionary were for me. I left and began Swahili and African studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh where I received a M.A. in African Studies, thinking at the time that I would end up working for the federal government. But Duquesne needed a Swahili teacher and by default I was asked to stand in for someone who had not showed up from Kenya. What serendipity! So while teaching Swahili at Duquesne I decided I needed to know more about language and linguistics and went to the University of Pittsburgh where I did a one-year MA in Linguistics (all pre-Chomskian), but it was enough to convince me that Swahili and linguistics would be a life-long career. The following year, 1965–I was married by then with our first child–my wife Claudia and I were in Tanzania where I worked in a mission-operated language school for three years supervising language instruction, writing teaching materials, and doing fieldwork on one of the local Bantu languages. Only in doing the latter did I discover I still didn’t know enough about linguistics and I needed to study more. In 1968 I came to UCLA and studied with such giants as Bill Welmers, Talmy Givon, Sandra Thompson, and Vicky Fromkin and I’ve been here ever since, joining the faculty in 1973. I do get back to Africa on a regular basis. I did my dissertation research in Kenya in 1972/73, there were Bantu workshops in Ruanda in 1982 and 1984, and research in the Comoro Islands in 1983. I spent the summer of 1994 in Swaziland and South Africa attending a conference and exploring linkages on behalf of the African Studies Center. In 1989 and 1990 I took around 15 students each year to Kenya and Tanzania to study Advanced Swahili. My wife and I are now empty-nesters: our three grown children are now on their own–we hope!

In 2005 I retired. After retirement I did some teaching, my Comparative Bantu course, and occasionally I helped with Swahili teaching. Also for a year after retirement I was Associate Director of the African Studies Center. I have three current projects: 1) a Swahili Classical Poetry Dictionary: http://swahilipoetry.humnet.ucla.edu/; 2) The Documentation of Endangered Heritage Swahili: http://swahiliendangered.cdh.ucla.edu/; and 3) the 3rd edition of the Hinnebusch/Mirza elementary Swahili teaching manual.

And I do have another life besides Swahili and linguistics. There’s daily weedpicking and grubbing in my garden, birdwatching, and international travel for conferences and bird photography. And I’m chief escort for Claudia’s jaunts to performances at the Music Center and plays at the Mark Taper, Odyssey and other theatres.

Research

My main research focus has always been Swahili and related Bantu languages mostly from a comparative and historical perspective. For most of my career I have been interested in questions concerning the classification of African languages and especially methodologies of classification; for example, I explored the value of lexicostatistics in Comparative Bantu studies. Since retirement I have been working on a digital dictionary of classical Swahili poetry (Swahili Classical Poetry Dictionary: http://swahilipoetry.humnet.ucla.edu/). With colleagues from other institutions I have been documenting the heritage Swahili dialects, that is the traditional mother tongue dialects of largely coastal Swahili speakers, not the standard dialects spoken by non-native speakers (Endangered Heritage Swahili: http://swahiliendangered.cdh.ucla.edu/).

Publications

Select Recent and Upcoming Publications (under revision April 2017)

“Rule inversion and restructuring in Kamba,” Studies in African Linguistics, Supplement 5, 149-67 (1974).
“A reconstructed chronology of loss: Swahili Class 9/10,” Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on African Linguistics, Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 20:32-41 (1975).
“Swahili: genetic affiliations and evidence,” In L.M. Hyman, L. Jacobsen,and R.G. Schuh (eds.), Papers in African Linguistics, in Honor of W. E. Welmers, pp. 95-108. Studies in African Linguistics, Supplement 6, (1976).
With Sarah Mirza. Kiswahili: Msingi wa Kusema, Kusoma, na Kuandika (Swahili: a Foundation for Speaking, Reading, and Writing). Washington:University Press of America, pp. i-xxi, 272. (1979).
“Swahili,” In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Languages and Their Status, pp. 208-293. Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers. (1979).
With Robert Kirsner, “On the inference of ‘Inalienable Possession’ in Swahili.” Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 2:1-16 (1980).
With Derek Nurse, and Martin Mould, Studies in the Classification of Eastern Bantu Languages (SUGIA, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika – Beiheft 3). Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 261 pages (1981).
With Derek Nurse, “Spirantization in Chaga.” SUGIA 3:51-78 (1981).
“Bantu.” In J. Bendor-Samuel (ed). The Niger-Congo Languages, pp.450-473. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. (1989).
With Derek Nurse. Swahili and Sabaki: a Linguistic History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 780 pages (1993).
Hinnebusch, Thomas J., “Contact and Lexicostatistics in Comparative Bantu Studies.” To be published in the proceedings of the 1st World Conference on African Linguistics. Witwatersrand Press, 28 pages (In Press).

Courses

My main teaching responsibility before retirement was 3 levels of Swahili: Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced Swahili. Elementary Swahili was usually taught by a T.A. who I supervised. I also offered instruction in the language beyond the advanced level. Every two years or so–when there was an interest–I offered a course on Comparative Bantu (African Languages 202); the focus and content of this course reflected the specific interests of the students. At various times over the years I taught Linguistics 120a (Phonology), Field Methods, Linguistics 1 (An Introduction to Language), and other undergraduate linguistics courses.