2018-2019

Fall-Winter-Summer 2018-2019 

September 27, 2018.

Organizer: Lyse Hébert, CRLCC member

Translation Day.

Keynote speaker: Raj Chetty.

“Translating Jacques Viau Renaud’s Black Internationalist Testimony”

Assistant professor of English at St. John’s University in Queens, NY, Raj Chetty

specializes in Caribbean literature across English, Spanish, and French, with a focus on

black and African diaspora. His current project, titled “On Refusal and Recognition”:

Disparate Blackness in Dominican Literary Culture, studies blackness in Dominican

literary and expressive cultures from the 1940s through the present. The book analyzes

street and popular theater, baseball and literature, 1960s literary and cultural journals

and groups, and includes studies of Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Junot Díaz, Jacques

Viau Renaud, and Frank and Reynaldo Disla. It is under advance contract with SUNY

Press’s “Afro-Latinx Futures”series. Chetty is the co-editor of a special issue of The

Black Scholar on “Dominican Black Studies,”and his essays on C. L. R. James, Eric

Walrond, Reynaldo Disla, Una Marson, and Frank Disla have appeared

in Callaloo, Anthurium, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black

International, Afro-Hispanic Review, and Meridional: Revista Chilena de Estudios

Latinoamericanos.

***

October 2, 2018

Organizer: Alejandro Zamora, CRLCC member

From Digital to Paper (and Back): The Genealogy of a Cyberpoet*’

In this presentation-recital/performance, Professor Escaja will explore the genealogy of

her poetry beyond the page: from the creation of a Cyborg identity to the construction of book-projects that involve art, technology, electronics and robotics, as new ways of

understanding and experiencing poetry in the new millennium.

Tina Escaja (Alm@ Pérez) is a destructivist/a cyber-poet@, digital artist and scholar

based in Burlington, Vermont. As a literary critic, she has published extensively on

gender and contemporary Latin American and Spanish poetry and technology.

The presentation will be in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

***

October 24, 2018

Organizer: Julie McDonough Dolmaya, CRLCC member and director of the CRLCC

Research Group on Translation and Transcultural Contact

From ‘personal’ to ‘public’: Translating birth-stories as counter-narratives

The talk will study the role of translated personal narratives in the production and

dissemination of knowledge within maternal and neonatal health. Birth stories are

noteworthy examples of such knowledge and experience being passed from one person to the next, one generation to the next, and one language and culture to another. This presentation will discuss the importance of examining birth stories shared online and in print among parents as resources for birth preparation. Narrative theory will be adopted to examine how personal narratives are circulated with a view to challenge the deeply ingrained public narratives on women’s bodies and social position within a given

society. This presentation will then examine a key text within the natural/positive birth

movement and its Turkish translation: the American midwife Ina May Gaskin’sclassic

work Guide to Childbirth (2003, translated into Turkish in 2014), which includes 126

pages of stories of births that took place at The Farm Midwifery Centre in Tennessee in

the 1970s, dating back to a time when birth outside a hospital setting was regarded as

unconventional in the United States.

Dr. Şebnem Susam-Saraeva is senior lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, She has published extensively ongender and translation, retranslations,

translation of literary and cultural theories, research methodology in translation studies,

and translation and social movements on the internet. She is also the co-vice president

of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) and

serves on the Steering Committee of the ARTIS initiative (Advancing Research in

Translation and Interpreting Studies).

***

November 21, 2018

Organizer: Stéphane Couture, member of the CRLCC

La pluralité des savoirs dans Wikipédia. Les cas du portail franco-ontarien et de

la version en langue autochtone atikamekw.

Cette conférence interroge la présence en ligne des savoirs minoritaires et non

occidentaux. Elle abordera les conditions de diffusion des savoirs sur la plateforme

Wikipédia, en s’appuyant sur un projet mené en partenariat avec Wikipédia Canada et

la nation autochtone atikamekw ainsi qu’un autre sur le portail franco-ontarien de

Wikipédia. Elle s’attachera plus particulièrement aux enjeux sociaux, politiques et

techniques des pratiques de savoir sur Wikipédia.

Intervenant: Nathalie Casemajor, Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS)

***

January 23, 2019

Organizer: Julie McDonough-Dolmaya, member of the CRLCCC

English translations of Tao Te Ching/Dao De Jing (Book of the Ways and the

Virtues): A Brief History

Abstract. No one would dispute that the Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran are the

most translated texts in the world in terms of the number of languages translated into.

Here is a phenomenal case study of the most translated text into one single target

language: English – Tao Te Ching/Dao De Jing (Book of the Ways and the Virtues), the

essential text for ancient Chinese philosophy and spirituality.

The presentation will focus on the brief history of the continued endeavour of translating

this masterpiece of ancient Chinese wisdom.

Intervenant: Xiaoping Song

***

January 29, 2019

Organizer: Julie McDonough-Dolmaya, member of the CRLCCC

Canadian Aboriginal Literary Works and Translator Neutrality

Abstract: This talk will consider what motivates translation of Aboriginal oral and written

literature in Canada from the point of view of translator neutrality. Early translations of

Aboriginal orality, not yet categorized as literature, were often produced by

ethnographers or those who considered themselves to be ethnographers. Despite the

scientific basis of ethnography, the translations produced were not always objective and neutral, although the situation improved in the latter part of the 20th century. More

Recent translations have been produced by translation studies scholars who consciously aim to produce what they consider to be ethical translations. Joseph-Charles Taché,

José Mailhot, Lianne Moyes and Valerie Henitiuk are the translators who will be

discussed, along with their translation products. The following question underpins the

presentation: Are there times when neutrality is an option, an obligation or an ethical

error when translating Aboriginal oral and written literature?

Intervenant: Denise Merkle, Université de Moncton

***

February 14, 2019 (**This event was POSTPONED due to an emergency by the

speaker).

Organizer: Gertrude Mianda, Chair of the Tubman Institute

Le racisme et la reitération de la déshumanisation exclavagiste dans le système

de santé canadien: une question d’ethique féministe appliquée.

Chercheuse et professeure études féministes et de genre, Agnès Berthelot-Raffard est

docteure en philosophie politique et éthique sociale de l’université Panthéon-Sorbonne

et de l’Université de Montréal). Ses recherches s’inscrivent dans les champs de la

philosophie féministe, de la philosophie Africana et des études philosophiques sur la

race. En 2017, dans l’optique de diffuser ce champ peu connu dans la philosophie et les études féministes francophones, elle a créé et enseigne depuis le premier -et unique cours universitaire accrédité de la francophonie entièrement dédié à l’étude de la

pensée féministe noire (dispensé à l’UQAM au Québec, à l’Institut de Recherches et

d’études féministes).

Agnès Berthelot-Raffard is a researcher, and professor of Feminist and Gender

studies. She held her PhDs in political philosophy and social ethics (Université

Panthéon-Sorbonne et Université de Montréal). Her works are focused on Feminist

philosophy, Africana philosophy, and philosophy of race. In the lode of her

research, she created the first and only accredited university course in the francophone

world devoted entirely to Black Feminist thought (UQAM, Montreal, Quebec at

the Institut de Recherches et d’Études feministes).

**

February 28, 2019

Organizer: Yann Allard-Tremblay, Chair of the Glendon Indigenous Affairs Council

Jeremy Dutcher: Inaugural Speaker for the Glendon Indigenous Affairs Council

Annual Confererence

Jeremy Dutcher is a classically trained operatic tenor and composer who takes every

opportunity to blend his Wolastoq First Nation roots into the music he creates, blending

distinct musical aesthetics that shape-shift between classical, traditional, and pop to

form something entirely new. Dutcher’s debut release, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa,

involves the rearrangement of early 1900s wax cylinder field recordings from his

community. The conference will be followed by a reception from 5pm to 7pm in the

BMO Skyroom.

This conference is part of the initiatives suggested by the Glendon Indigenous Council.

The Glendon Indigenous Council, over the last year, produced an action plan to

propose concrete ways of acting on the Glendon Indigenous Strategy. One of the

proposed actions was to hold a yearly cycle of conferences by Indigenous speakers

from diverse backgrounds including, but not limited to, scholars, activists and artists.

This is the first of these conferences.

**

March 2, 2019

Organizers: MA students in Translation, Glendon Campus

Keynote speaker for the Glendon Graduate Student Conference in Translation Studies

Michael Cronin, Trinity College Dublin

Translators are not simply language technicians; they bring something crucial and

significant to translation: their identities. But to what culture does their identity belong?

Can a translator belong to any single cultural identity? Can translation be an identity?

As Ivana Hostová (2017) notes, the concept of identity made its formal début in

translation studies in the mid-1990s and its popularity as a research topic has been

growing ever since. This year’s graduate student conference will explore the various

intersections between translation and identity: the pitfalls and triumphs of cultural

translation in an age of globalisation, the role of translators as cultural mediators in the

process of intercultural communication, the issues of hybrid identity, as well as

perceptions of identity through the prism of gender.

**

March 4, 2019

Organizers: Elena Basile and Gabriel Levine

Talking Treaties: A symbol-Making workshop on Land, History and Relation

Avec Ange Loft and Victoria Freeman du théâtre Jumblies.

Two events of 3 hours each, designed to engage Glendon students and community

members in conversations about the treaty history of the Toronto area and the ongoing

ethical obligations towards honouring relations and sharing the land, engendered by

that very same history. The events will be coordinated by Victoria Freeman and Ange

Loft, respectively historian and artistic director of Jumblies Theatre, Toronto’s most

prominent community-based theatre organization. The first event will consist of a

participatory and performative installation in the Canadian Language Museum on March 4, whereas the second event will be a Theatre Creation Workshop in the autumn 2019,

in the Glendon Theatre.

Both events are designed as experiential and dialogic learning activities for COMS 2100

Language, Media and Communication (with enrollment of 25 students) and DRST 4622

Current Intercultural Performance Practices (with an enrollment of 12 students), with the additional participation of up to interested community members from Glendon at large.

Ange Loft is a multidisciplinary theatre artist and performance-maker from Kahnewake

Mohawk Territory, whose performance work has met with wide acclaim. Her project

Talking Treaties, with Jumblies Theatre, is a multi-year community-based creation

process culminating in a large-scale outdoor pageant at Fort York in June 2017,

involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous performers and collaborators. Further

information about Ange Loft’s work can be found here:

http://angeloft.tumblr.com

Victoria Freeman is a historian, freelance writer and community organizer, who works

on supporting indigenous/non-indigenous decolonization in Canada. She is the author

of Distant Relations: How my Ancestors Colonized North-America (McLelland and

Steward, 200) and is the co-writer with Ange Loft of The Talking Treaties Spectacle.

More information on Victoria Freeman’s work can be found here:

https://victoriafreeman.ca/about/bio/

***

April 1, 2019

Organizer: Julie Dolmaya-McDonough, CRLCC member

“Coco and the case of the disappearing Spanglish: Negotiating code-switching in the

English and Spanish versions of Disney and Pixar’s animated film”

Intervenant: Remy Attig

Brown Bag Lunch Research Talk Series

(Reverse chronological order)

***

May 8, 2019

Isabelle Zaugg

Global Language Justice in the Digital Sphere: The Ethiopic Case

We currently face unprecedented rates of extinction of minority and indigenous

languages and scripts, and digital technologies appear to be contributing to their

decline. Scholars predict 50-90% of languages will become extinct this century, while

only 5% of languages will attain digital vitality. This presentation investigates what can

be done to close this digital divide through an instrumental case study of Unicode

inclusion and the development of supports for the Ethiopic script and its languages,

including the national language of Ethiopia. Mixed methods include observation of

digital governance institutions, archival research, a content analysis of script and

language choices on social media, and interviews with Ethiopic digital pioneers. This

presentation concludes with recommendations to strengthen supports for digitally disadvantaged languages, from inclusion in the Unicode Standard, to grassroots coding

within and on behalf of digitally-disadvantaged language communities, to advancing the

idea that supporting linguistic diversity is Silicon Valley’s corporate social responsibility.

***

April 24th, 2019

Professor Julie Mcdonough- Dolmaya

Translation in Canadian Municipalities: Reflections on the Toronto.ca website

According to the 2016 Canadian census, the City of Toronto has a population of 2.73

million. While the vast majority of the city’s residents speaks one of the country’s two

official languages, 43.8% of Torontonians have a non-official language as a mother

tongue, and 26% speak a language other than English at home. This means that many

of the city’s residents likely prefer to access municipal information in a langauge other

than English. But, if the city decides to translate certain documents into non-official

languages, which ones should be targeted: those with the greatest number of speakers,those in danger of disappearing (such as indigenous languages), those that have thegreatest number of professional translators, etc. (cf. Patten 2001, Pool 1991)?

In this presentation, I will discuss the City of Toronto’s Multilingual Information

Provisions Policy, which came into effect on August 2, 2017, and the Toronto.ca

website, which provides information on various municipal policies and services in

multiple languages. My research is inspired by three studies: one by Lyse Hébert

(2017), which studied Toronto’s previous language policy, one by Jiménez-Crespo

(2012), which discussed the degree of localization of US non-profit websites, and

another by Carroll (2010), which examined translation in the municipal websites of

Japan. I will focus particularly on the following questions: which pages and documents

are available in a language other than English? Which language communities are

targeted by these translations and how do these compare to the number of Toronto

residents who speak these languages at home? And finally, how do the languages and

texts chosen for translation reflect the city’s translation policy? When concluding, I will

briefly discuss questions of linguistic justice and consider how the City of Toronto’s

website could be made more linguistically accessible without greatly increasing the

costs of language services.

***

April 17th, 2019

York Hall- B209 – CRLCC meeting room

Elena Basile

In the “pore (pour) of languages”: displacements and tears of self-translation in the work

of Nathanaël

This presentation explores questions of self-translation as they accrue around the

dispersal of selves and languages in the work of Nathanaël, a bilingual (French and

English) auteure whose work defies genre and gender expectations, obstinately

performing a poetics of radical refusal of identity and its discursive imbrications in

hegemonic politics of naming and belonging. Specifically, I will discuss some issues that are emerging from a bilingual anthology of the auteure’s work, which I am presently

putting together for a US literary publisher, Nightboat Editions. Hailing from diasporic

Sephardic ancestry dispersed between Morocco, France and Canada, and living by

choice in a space of gender dissonance, Nathanaël’s work pointedly explores questions

of erasure and displacement attendant to the movement of self-translation as it gives

rise to divergent processes of “equivocation” – of the name, of the body and of writing

itself. In my presentation I plan to loosen some conceptual threads tightly wrapped

around the name, the body and writing, in an attempt to render visible the existential

aporias and epistemological indeterminacies that take hold when one attends carefully

to the reasoned madness of translation and its ever shifting boundaries.

***

April 10th, 2019

PROFESSOR IAN MARTIN

Towards an Observatory of Indigenous Languages Policy in the Americas. ( PPT

available here: Toward an Indigenous Language Policy Index Brown Bag April 10,

2019)

2019 has been designated by the United Nations as the Year of Indigenous Languages,

and this talk is part of Glendon’s effort to mark this significant year. Inspired by such

‘observatories’ as the Queen’s Global Democracy Observatory, the proposed

Observatory of Indigenous LP would be a scholarly research project that monitors the

evolution of Indigenous LP in all the countries of the Americas. The Observatory would

provide information about Indigenous language policies in a standardized format that

would aid comparative research and contribute to the creation and development

of Canada’s and other countries’ legislation on Indigenous LP. In its present state of

‘towardness’, the Index has been designed with the purpose of evaluating the current

Canadian federal government promised response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls

to Action #13, #14 and #15, by applying the principles expressed in the TRC report to

evaluate Indigenous language policies at the national/federal level in selected countries

of the Americas. Also, in search of an index, we have drawn upon the Canadian

experience with the protection of Official Language Communities in minority contexts,

and sub-national legislation such as Nunavut’s Inuit Language Protection Act (2008),

and existing provincial legislation (such as in B.C.) on Indigenous languages. An

example of LP at the level of Indigenous Nation – the Kahnawa:ke Language Law – is

included as well as a glance at two non-American Indigenous legislative measures: the

Sámi Language Act and the M version of this talk has been delivered at the IAAL

conference in Rio de Janeiro (August 2017), the FLACSO International Studies

Conference in Quito (August, 2018), the Giidwewinanan/No Lang Indigenous LP

Conference, Thunder Bay (May, 2017).

It’s appropriate that this talk be presented under the auspices of the CRLCC, since the

contact between Euro-origin culture and language(s) and Indigenous culture and

language(s) of the Americas could arguably be said to have been the ‘Big Bang’ of

language and culture contact/conflict in the history of the world. It is certainly the only

example of language/culture contact which has been claimed to have given rise to a

such changes in planetary ecology as to warrant defining the contact as producing a

new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.

***

March 13, 2019

Altaf Qadeer (Ph.D.)

When Languages Travel To The Hearts Of The World For Centuries.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary and the changing trends of multilingualism

(Some Urdu/Hindi lexemes in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary )

Where: Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Abstract

The expanding universe of languages with multilingual dimensions has some intriguing

interactions. Languages go through many changes in the frames of cognitive-net,

social-net, linguistic-net, internet, i.e., multiple-nets.

Lexemes fly with multidisciplinary wings in various multilingual spaces.

A brief study of Urdu/Hindi lexemes in various editions of the Concise Oxford English

Dictionary (COED) provides some data for diachronic and synchronic analyses. The

changing descriptions of some words in the COED indicate the influences of various

social and historical changes. Multilingualism is increasing in many forms and frames.

Multicultural cities have language speakers of various languages and their

communication back-home can be a powerful resource for multitudinous purposes.

Languages have fascinating influences at local, national and international forums. Thereis a possibility to think about the ways in which we can play an important role to

empower social, cultural, educational, linguistic, economic, scientific and cultural growth through the multilingual power of Canada. The deep understanding of these factors can also give Centre for Research on Language and Culture Contact (CRLCC) some possible pathways to explore further.

***

March 21, 2019

Where: Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Visual literacy: a social semiotic approach to analyzing magazine covers in a foreign culture

Isis Pordeus

Federal University of Minas Gerais

“Within a simple cover of a newspaper [or magazine], there is a professional work in the selection of small and apparently insignificant details, which, nevertheless, are decisive in the communicative action.” (CF – a student in the research project)

“Literacies are legion.” (Lemke, 2004)

Abstract

We live in a world populated with images: illustrated magazines, newspapers, comic books, videos and movies. In my experience as a teacher of foreign languages –

English and Portuguese – I have always tried to guide my students into exploring what

images can communicate. Nothing is accidental in an image used in advertisements,newspapers, magazine covers or text books’ illustrations. Becoming media critical in a foreign culture (and in one’s own culture) is essential to uncover meanings not ‘directly’ accessible to the reader as in a text, for example. Social semiotics (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996) allied to insights on visual communication (Jewitt & Oyama, 2001) offer invaluable support in helping learners to read images critically. This presentation reports on an activity conducted with learners of Portuguese as an Additional Language. The learners were presented to theory on Social Semiotic Analysis of Visual Communication and some examples before receiving samples from magazine covers to analyze. The results indicate that the students were able to derive powerful readings from the combination of images and text, going beyond initial expectations.

Keywords: Media Critical; Portuguese as an Additional Language; Social Semiotics; Visual Communication.

***

March 27th, 2019

Where: Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Eva C. Karpinski

Associate Professor – School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

LA & PS

“Unsettling Settler Biopower through Multilingual Eco-Ethnography and Indigenous Oral Histories”

My presentation focuses on two published oral history narratives collected among Indigenous communities in the North: Lorelei Anne Lambert Colomeda’s Through the

Looking Glass: Breast Cancer Stories Told by Northern Native Women (1996) and Ila Bussidor and Üstun Bilgen-Reinart’s Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene (2000). In both cases we are dealing with hybrid translations of traumatic

experiences; both texts preserve traces of multilingualism and combine personal, ecological, anthropological, and biopolitical discourses with the use of innovative epistemologies and methodologies rooted in Indigenous traditions. I want to explore the

productive potentialities of multilingualism in these authors’ engagements with Indigenous communities, and examine in particular how they work together with their respondents towards challenging and unsettling the colonial matrix.

***

February 14, 2019

Professor Daniel Ferraz

University of São Paolo- Brazil

Where: Canadian Language Museum ( Click here for directions)

Brazilian education “under attack”: On the urgency of critical literacies

This talk problematizes contemporary language education in Brazil in the face of the recent neoliberal and neoconservative political context. In doing so, we ask: Where do we place critique within the curriculum in neoconservative times? What is left to teachers in their commitment to educate critical citizens? Do critical literacies suffice?

To respond to these questions, a set of contemporary snapshots are brought to the fore,unveiling all the anguish brought up by the complex politics of “us” versus “them”. Some understandings of Critical Literacies (CLs) within the field are then reviewed, preparing

the terrain for the reading of ourselves in relation to our theories and practices. To conclude, I outline a few orientations which seek to relocate CLs beyond the dichotomic view of the micro versus macro as a formative strategy in dealing with our frustrations in such complex times.

***

January 23, 2019

Professor Elaine Gold

Canadian Language Museum and Language outreach

Research and Outreach: Planning Exhibits for the Canadian Language Museum by

Elaine Gold

One of the goals of the CLM is to “introduce the public to the scientific study of language and to current language research in Canada”. In this talk I will describe different ways in which the CLM has attempted to fulfill this part of its mandate over the past eight years. We have put a lot of thought into how to make linguistic concepts accessible to those who might have little or no background in the field. I will illustrate the talk with examples from our exhibit panels currently on display in the gallery. I would then like to open the discussion to the group: how could the CLM help you inform a wider public about your research?

***

January 9, 2019

Karla De Souza Araujo

Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Pernambuco (Brasil)

“Advisor-Advisee Relationships in MA Studies: The Hermeneutics of Facticity and Encounters of Being”

In the context of MA studies, the relationship established between the advisor and the advisee may have several configurations, which motivates the question: how can scholarly advising and mentorship promote spaces for building knowledge? This presentation considers the results of a PhD thesis in Linguistics, developed at a Brazilian University, based on a case study of MA students and their advisors. The study is rooted in two theoretical traditions: on the one hand, Bakhtin’s philosophy of language (1997, 2002) and on the other, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity (2003,2012), which have become intertwined, allowing us to observe how subjects

discursively construct the narrative of their relationship. We also refer to ergology

(SCHWARTZ, 1998 and FAÏTA, 2002), through which we work with and through the

notion of academic orientation as an activity. We conclude advising, as an activity, is a space for the possibility of change, and its vocation is to foster encounters and openings of being.

***

December 12, 2018

PROFESSOR AURELIA KLIMKIEWICZ

LA VOIX EN TRADUCTION ET LE PRINCIPE POST/DIALOGIQUE

La voix introduit une dynamique dialogique dans le processus de traduction et de ce fait rend visible/audible la participation du sujet traduisant dans la co/production du sens étant donné que « Le sens se répartit entre diverses voix » (Bakhtin 84 : 323). Mais capter la voix du sujet traduisant va au-delà d’une simple refonte du statut ontologique de la traduction (invisible-visible, passif-actif) : cela permet de mettre en scène la relation entre le propre et l’étranger et du même coup d’analyser les modalités

d’articulation entre ces deux instances telles qu’elles se manifestent dans le processus

de traduction. Dans cet exposé, la réflexion sera menée à partir des approches

narratologique (objectivité) et herméneutique (subjectivité) et débouchera sur les

problèmes de traduction/réception dans le cyberespace. Différents exemples de

traduction et retraduction seront discutés pour illustrer le propos.

***

November 28, 2019.

Bruce Connell

-Co-hosted with Multidisciplinary Studies, Glendon Campus

Reconstructing Tone: Mambila, Mambiloid, Bantoid and Beyond

Connell’s scholarship is motivated by an interest in historical linguistics and phonetics.

In this work, Connell systematically studies the Mambiloid languages, spoken in a region that spans the Nigeria-Camerooon border, north of the Cameroon Grassfield.

Mambiloid is a Bantoid group comprising some 35 different lects or language varieties; it is related to the Bantu languages that cover most of the southern half of Africa. In the

literature, Mambiloid languages are under-described — only extended word lists exist for the great majority of Mambiloid lects. All are tone languages, with complex tone inventories. Specifically, Mambiloid languages have either three or four lexical tone

registers, which combine to create a number of contours. Through the systematic study of the tones across different lects, Connell seeks to reconstruct the system of lexical

tone that existed in proto-Mambiloid. The empirical materials are drawn from more than 800 items for most Mambiloid lects, from Connell’s own field work, as well as additional data from other researchers. The evidence suggests support for the reconstruction of a two-tone system in Proto Mambiloid which was on the cusp of evolving into one of tree tones, and has now evolved into one of four tones in several present-day Mambiloid languages.