This article explores the socio-temporal dimensions of Kisongo Maasai women’s age grades and their entanglement with the male age-set system. Although Maasai women lack an institutionalized age-set system, their age grades are linguistically and culturally constituted to serve as socio-temporal frames of reference (s-tFoRs) that allow people to position women as they traverse the life course. These age grades - endito, esyangiki, endasat, and engoko – anchor women’s social positions and responsibilities relative to the age-set system. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, this article analyses the narratives and experiences of a woman named Ninalenyo to illuminate how seniority and social status are negotiated among contemporary Maasai women. By situating Ninalenyo’s experiences within broader anthropological discourses on gender and age, this paper highlights critical roles in sustaining and shaping the Maasai socio-cultural system. The article concludes by showing that in the life of Maasai women, age grades serve as a crucial, seniority-based organizational element that defines and interrelates different women and is organized by women (not men). Editorial note: This article was appended to the Special Issue “Framing Difference in Age and Generation in Africa” in August 2026.
The Kagulu auxiliary verb ng'hali appears in a variety of auxiliary verb constructions and has several phonological realizations (ng'hali, kali, and ng'hati). Unlike other auxiliary verbs in the language, ng'hali occurs with limited morphology and is not used as a main verb. As in many Bantu languages, ng'hali has phasal polarity properties (see van Baar 1997; Kramer 2021): it yields 'still' and 'not yet' interpretations. The goal of this paper is to describe the morphophonological, morphosyntactic, and morphosemantic properties of ng'hali. We explore the development of ng'hali into an aspect marker and its co-occurrence with more complex auxiliary verb constructions consisting of other Kagulu verbs, namely the auxiliary uwa 'be' and gendelela 'continue'. In addition to being the first detailed description of these underdocumented properties of ng'hali, this study contributes to our understanding of the role that auxiliaries play in languages with reduced tense/aspect morphology, as well as the grammaticalization paths of auxiliaries in Bantu languages.
Southern Bantu languages have extensive auxiliary inventories with functions that sometimes go beyond typical tense/aspect/mood/polarity meanings. This article examines areal semantic patterns of auxiliaries in 16 Southern Bantu varieties, identifying functions that are regularly encoded by auxiliary forms. In addition to tense, aspect, modal, and negation meanings, these include sequentiality functions ('until', 'after', 'furthermore', and 'meanwhile', among others) and adverbial-like functions such as 'quickly, soon', 'do well', 'do in vain, fail', 'nevertheless', 'rather, preferably', and 'just, merely'. This article aims to give a systematic overview of auxiliary functions and where they are attested across Southern Bantu, allowing for further targeted studies and cross-linguistic investigations and leading, ultimately, to a better understanding of the origins of Southern Bantu auxiliary systems.
This paper reports findings from a study examining Rwandans' attitudes towards Swahili across different occupational groups. The study hypothesized that there would be a relationship between Rwandans' occupations and their attitudes towards Swahili. Data were collected from 252 respondents representing six occupations: teachers, civil servants, traders, journalists, Catholic priests, and Muslim leaders. The respondents' attitudes were elicited using a questionnaire containing ten Likert-scale statements (e.g., "Swahili is the language best suited for administration"), with responses ranging from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". For analysis, "agree" and "strongly agree" were classified as positive, "disagree" and "strongly disagree" as negative, and "can't tell" as neutral attitudes. A chi-square test was conducted to evaluate the hypothesis. It yielded a value of 450.5 with 10 degrees of freedom, significant at both p < .05 and p < .01, thus confirming a relationship between occupation and attitudes towards Swahili. Comparatively, 53% of overall attitudes were negative, 21% were neutral, and only 19% were positive. Traders were the only occupational group with more positive than negative attitudes towards Swahili.
