Although Swahili is a large, vibrant and socio-politically dominant language spoken across the whole of East Africa, with a long history of written records, several aspects of this Bantu language and its varieties have still not been coherently researched. One such under-explored area is that of modality, viz. linguistic expressions such as can, must and perhaps, that refer to the non-factual status of a proposition. This is surprising, particularly because the Swahili modal system may offer important insights into contact-induced change, as many of its modals were originally borrowed and then spread to many other East African languages.

The aim of this project is to offer the first detailed and comprehensive account of expressions of modality in Swahili, focusing on the role of contact-induced variation and change through time and space. This will be accomplished through both corpus-driven research – to which end the world’s largest diachronic Swahili corpus will be developed – and comparative-typological work (including fieldwork) targeting East African languages that show Swahili influence in their modal systems.

Building on the growing research interest in both Bantu modality and Swahili-related linguistic variation and change, we address the socio-historical causes and cognitive constraints underpinning the trajectories of development within the domain of modality in Swahili and beyond.