Allen Asiimwe

Allen Asiimwe is Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Languages, School of Languages, Literature and Communication. Allen Asiimwe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Languages, School of Languages, Literature and Communication at Makerere University. She is passionate about documenting and analysing linguistic aspects of the Runyankore-Rukiga language cluster spoken in Uganda but also documentation and preservation of cultural heritage of the people who speak these languages. She recently collected and documented Rukiga personal names and conducted a linguistic analysis of these names. She has also analysed traditional religious beliefs of the people of the former Kitara kingdom. Such efforts are aimed at fostering preservation of cultural heritage for posterity, which are threatened by the current trends of globalisation. Allen has experience in collaborative research. She was one of the collaborators on the Bantu Syntax and Information Structure project (https://bantusyntaxinformationstructure.com/; 2017-2023). She is currently part of the team that is working on a project under UNA EUROPA aimed at enhancing scholarship in linguistics in Eastern Africa.

Qualifications:

PhD (African Languages)

School:

Languages Literature and Communication

Department:

African Languages

Email:

allen.asiimwe@mak.ac.ug

Office Physical Address:

Lower Building

Research interests:

Morphosyntax

Information Structure

Onomastics

Linguistic anthropology

Membership to Professional Bodies:

Language Association of Eastern Africa

Undergraduate Courses Taught:

Phonetics and Phonology

Runyakitara Morphology

Runyakitara Syntax

Materials Development and Evaluation

Research Methods

Lexicology and lexicography of Runyakitara

Graduate Courses Taught:

Research Methods

Advanced Morphosyntax

Master’s Students Supervised:

Grants:

Enhancing Linguistic Scholarship in Eastern Africa

Activation states in Rukiga: An alternative approach to the analysis of definiteness in Bantu languages

The onomastics of Rukiga personal names: structure, meaning and shifts in naming patterns

Creating Children’s literacy resources for social inclusion and national development

Communicating COVID-19-related messages in multilingual contexts

An assessment of the implementation strategies of mother tongue education in Uganda: a case of northern Uganda

Publication:

Journal articles

Asiimwe, Allen. (2023). On the expression of mirativity in Rukiga. Studies in African Linguistics Volume 52 Supplement 13. Pp. 28-46.
Asiimwe, Allen, Kouneli, Maria and van der Wal, Jenneke. (2023). Determiner spreading in Rukiga. Linguistics, vol. 61, no. 5pp. 1285-1339. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0027.
Elisabeth J. Kerr, Allen Asiimwe, Patrick Kanampiu, Zhen Li, Ernest Nshemezimana & Jenneke van der Wal. (2023). “Bantu word order between discourse and syntactic relations”, Linguistique et langues africaines [Online], 9(1). https://doi.org/10.4000/lla.9496
Li, Zhen, Elisabeth J. Kerr, Allen Asiimwe, Patrick Kanampiu, Ernest Nshemezimana, Jenneke van der Wal (eds.), (2023). Bantu Universals and Variation. Special issue of Linguistique et Langues Africaines 9(1).
Ssentanda, Medadi & Allen, Asiimwe. (2023). Teachers’ perspectives and related classroom practices in mother tongue literacy development in Uganda. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, Vol. 66, 2023, 1-24.
Asiimwe, Allen (2022). A linguistic analysis of Rukiga personal names. Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 2. DOI: 10.5642/jlaea.CMTG5561
Asiimwe, Allen & Jenneke, Van der Wal. (2021). The multifunctionality of ‑o in Rukiga: pronoun, contrastive topic, and mirative marker. Nordic Journal of African Studies. 30(1), 1-26.
Van der Wal, Jenneke & Allen, Asiimwe. (2020). The tonal residue of the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Rukiga. Studies in African Linguistics 49 (1), 43-59.
Ssentanda, Medadi & Allen, Asiimwe. (2020) Challenges to the Acquisition
of Literacy in Rural Primary Schools in Northern Uganda. Language Matters, 51:1, 38-62.
Asiimwe, Allen. (2019). The syntax of relative clause constructions in Runyankore-Rukiga: A typological perspective. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 58, 131-154.
Asiimwe, Allen. (2016). Investigating the connection between the demonstrative and the definite morpheme a- in Runyankore-Rukiga. South African Journal of African Languages 30(1) pp 65-73.

Book chapters

Asiimwe Allen. (2024). The Expression of Tense and Aspect in Rukiga. In L. Mugumya, A. Asiimwe, M.E. Ssentanda W.G. Wagaba & F.T. Bayiga (Eds.), The Promise of Linguistics and Language Studies in Africa (pp. 169-195). Fountain Publishers.
Asiimwe, Allen. (2024). The structure, distribution and function of demonstratives in Runyankore-Rukiga. In Hannah Gibson, Rozenn Guérois, Gastor Mapunda & Lutz Marten (eds.), Morphosyntactic variation in East African Bantu languages: Descriptive and comparative approaches. Berlin: Language Science Press. 43–83. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10663765
Dorothee Beermann & Allen Asiimwe. 2024. Locatives in Runyankore-Rukiga. In: Morphosyntactic Variation in Bantu. Edited by: Eva-Marie Bloom Ström, Hannah Gibson, Rozenn Guérois, and Lutz Marten, Oxford University Press. Pages 272- 289. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198821359.003.00

Conference proceedings

Asiimwe, Allen. (2018). The augment as an exclusive focus marker in Runyankore-Rukiga. In CM. Ndungo Leonard, Chacha Mwita Ngugi P M,Y. Justus S. Makokha, and Daniel Ngugi. Proceedings of “From Asmara 2000 to Nairobi 2014: Trends in African Languages and Literatures” (pp. 249-264). Nairobi Kenya: Institute of African Studies, Kenyatta University.

d. Media Article

Medadi Ssentanda & Allen Asiimwe (2020, June 2). How Uganda is failing to help rural children learn languages. The Conversation. Available at https://theconversation.com/how-uganda-is-failing-to-help-rural-children-learn-languages-119403

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