Conferences & Congresses

Four decades of Somali studies conducted largely from Moscow meant that the field itself was met at congresses — in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Leiden, Berlin, San Diego. What follows is the documented record of those appearances, with the papers given at each.

Somali Studies congresses

4th Congress of Somali Studies — Mogadishu, 1989. The first visit to Somalia, at the invitation of the Somali Academy of Sciences. Twenty years later the same city was revisited in a series of travel essays written for Voice of Russia.

8th International Congress of Somali Studies — Hargeisa, 3–13 July 2001. Paper: Towards the paremiological minimum of the Somali language, presenting the results of the field experiment that established a list of 226 proverbs actively known to a majority of informants.

The congress itself — its poets, its hundred papers on peace, governance and reconstruction, and the young unrecognised state that hosted it — is described at length in the essay Scholars in the Country of Poets, first published in Horn of Africa, Vol. IXX, 2001.

9th Congress of the Somali Studies International Association — 2004. Paper: Variants and Variations of Somali Proverbs (Some results of the paremiological experiment in Berlin and Aarhus), drawing the distinction between a variation, which leaves the general meaning intact, and a variant, which modifies it and may amount to a separate proverb.

Somali Studies International Association conference — Ohio, 2007.

Cushitic and Semito-Hamitic linguistics

4th International Conference of Cushitic and Omotic Languages — Leiden, 10–12 April 2003. Paper: Some results of the Somali paremiological experiment in Berlin and Arhus — the fullest account of the method: how the experimental corpus was assembled from a dictionary of over 6,000 paremias, reduced to 656 truncated proverbs, and put to 45 informants; and how, of 29,520 possible completions, 12,342 (41.8%) were filled in correctly.

7th International Semito-Hamitic Congress — Berlin, 2004. Paper: Paremias without sentence particles, on the seven per cent of the corpus in which the obligatory focus particles are absent — and on why, in part of that group, no particle can be reconstructed at all, marking those paremias as the oldest stratum of the proverbial stock.

“5000 Years of Semito-Hamitic Languages in Asia and Africa” — Free University of Berlin, 22–24 July 2010. Paper on the dialect division of Somali and the sociolinguistic situation of the little-studied southern area. The conference is described in A. G. Belova’s chronicle in Vostok (Oriens), 2011, No. 1, pp. 137–142.

Festivals and public events

Buranbur conference — San Diego, 3 March 2007. Two papers: On some peculiarities of the Somali language, proverbs and folktales, an introduction to the language and its oral genres for a mixed audience; and Men and women in the Somali narrative folklore, which assembles the proverbs about women into what looks at first like a catalogue of complaints and then turns it over — Naagla’aani waa nafla’aan, “if there is no woman there is no life” — and tests the point against two folktales.

Somali Week Festival — Oxford House, Bethnal Green, London, 22–30 October 2011. An evening on the imagery and metaphor of proverbs, sayings and tales. The festival’s theme that year was literary translation. The occasion was reported for Somali readers by the journalist Maxamed Xasan “Alto”.

5th Hargeisa International Book Fair — July 2012. Presentation of Soomaalidu Been ma Maahmaahdo (“Somalis do not lie in proverbs”) on 14 July 2012. The fair, and this presentation in it, were covered by The Guardian and by the Horn newspaper — see News.

Paremiology

Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs — Tavira, Portugal, 2018. Paper on Somali enumerative proverbs. Recorded by Peter Unseth in his review of the 2020 dictionary in Proverbium, Vol. 39, 2022 — see Reviews. This is the latest conference appearance for which a source has been found; the record above it, drawn from the author’s own bibliography, ended in 2012.