The Rift Valley Linguistic Area 10 years on: critical evaluation and the way forward

Kießling, Mous, and Nurse's "The Tanzanian Rift Valley Area" was published in Heine and Nurse's A Linguistic Geography of Africa in 2008, and went some way to establishing the Rift Valley Area as an object of linguistic inquiry. Approximately 10 years on, this talk aims to revisit this work. In the light of new data, new research methods, and new understandings of linguistic contact, linguistic change, and linguistic areas, the present marks an exciting point at which to reconsider the Rift Valley, and reexamine what it is and, more importantly, what it still has to teach us.