Professor Lutz Marten FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2026
- Subjects
- Linguistics
- Sections
- Linguistics and Philology
Summary
Lutz Marten studied English language and literature, philosophy and African studies at the University of Hamburg before joining SOAS University of London, where he completed his PhD in 1999 and where is now a professor of general and African linguistics.
His research interests are in linguistics, African languages and area studies. He has written on topics in comparative and historical linguistics, language variation and change, and questions of language, society and identity, as well as in formal linguistics and linguistic theory (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, formal models of interpretation – in particular Dynamic Syntax). Most of his research focuses on African languages of Eastern and Southern Africa, in particular Bantu languages such as Swahili, Bemba, and Herero. His recent work includes morphosyntactic variation in Bantu, the description and promotion of the Kenyan Bantu Language Kitaveta, linguistic variation in Swahili, and cultural translation of Covid-19 in London’s community languages.
He has served as Head of the Department of Linguistics, Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures, and as Head of the SOAS Doctoral School, as well as UK-Director of the London Confucius Institute and as a member of the Area Studies sub-panel for REF2014 and REF2021. He was involved in developing SOAS’s Language Strategy and in setting up SOAS’s Language for Lockdown series during Covid-19. He is Founding Chair of the International Conference on Bantu Linguistics and currently serves as the President of the Philological Society. He has held visiting positions at universities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.