Abande Mohammed Shettima Succesfully Defends PhD Dissertation

2 June 2023

Photo: CSMC

Abande Mohammed Shettima has passed his viva voce examination, thus completing his PhD in African Languages and Linguistics.

Congratulations to Abande Mohammed Shettima! He defended his PhD dissertation on 26 May 2023. His thesis, which is entitled 'Morphosyntactic Variation and Scribal Practices in the Old Kanembu Manuscripts', was supervised by Dmitry Bondarev and Roland Kießling.

Many Islamic manuscripts from Nigeria, Niger and Chad have annotations in Old Kanembu – one of the earliest written languages in West Africa, related to the modern Kanembu and Kanuri languages. Beyond general similarities in syntactic and morphological structures featured in Old Kanembu glosses, there is a considerable amount of variation across the manuscripts. Shettima's dissertation groups eleven digitised Qur’an manuscripts from historical Borno according to their linguistic and palaeographic features and maps morphosyntactic variation in manuscripts to the regional Kanembu and Kanuri dialects. This helps us understand the relation between different scribal schools and different dialects.