Steve Nicolle, DPhil

Affiliate Professor of Linguistics; MA Linguistics & Translation Program Director
I enjoy helping students discover for themselves how languages work. As we work through a problem or a text together, I often learn as much as my students. Human communication and culture is as diverse as the languages that we speak, and much of my research deals with previously undescribed languages.

Steve Nicolle has been involved in linguistic research and Bible translation since 1999. He spent 15 years in east and central Africa with SIL International, where he worked with speakers of over 60 languages helping them to analyze their languages, develop writing systems and dictionaries, and translate the Bible. He joined TWU in 2013, having previously been head of the Department of Linguistics and Translation at Africa International University in Nairobi, Kenya. He regularly leads linguistic training events in various countries in Africa and elsewhere, and also shares his passion for language with students at TWU and ACTS. He is director of the MA in Linguistics & Translation (MALT) program and author of over 70 academic publications dealing with topics such as Bantu languages, Bible translation, language change, tense/aspect, demonstratives, conditional sentences, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and ethnobotany. Steve is a keen cyclist (he commutes to campus by bike, rain or shine) and enjoys brewing his own beer (which seems appropriate for the director of the MALT program).

See: https://www.canil.ca/wordpress/u_member/dr-steve-nicolle/

  • DPhil Linguistics (University of York, UK; 1997)
  • Postgraduate Certificate in Education (UK teaching qualification) in English as a Second/Foreign Language (University College of North Wales, Bangor, UK;1993)
  • BA Linguistics with Philosophy (University of York, UK;1992)

Expertise

Semantics and pragmatics, Grammatical analysis, Bantu languages, Language change, Bible translation

Awards & Honors

  • Guest editor, SIL Journal of Translation, special issue on translating conditional sentences in the New Testament (2022)
  • Invited speaker at "Conditionals 2" summer school, Institut Nationale des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris (2022)
  • Guest editor, Studies in African Linguistics special issue on conditional constructions in African languages (2017)
  • Keynote speaker, 6th International Conference on Bantu Languages (Helsinki, Finland, 2016)

Recent Publications

Selected publications

  • 2023 A Grammar of Digo: A Bantu language of Kenya and Tanzania (Revised edition) Dallas, TX: SIL International.
  • 2022 Conditionals in the New Testament: Interpretation and translation. Journal of Translation 18(2): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.54395/JOT-6CPW9
  • 2022 Conditionals in Galatians: A guide for translators. Journal of Translation 18(2): 89–113. https://doi.org/10.54395/JOT-6C3CH
  • 2017 Conditional constructions in African languages. Studies in African Linguistics 46:1–15. https://doi.org/10.32473/sal.v46i1.107239 (Introduction to special issue of SAL on conditional constructions in African languages.)
  • 2017 Narrative discourse analysis and Bible translation: Training materials based on Acts 16:16–40. (SIL Forum for Language Fieldwork 2017–001.) https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entr...
  • 2016 Variation in the expression of information structure in eastern Bantu languages. In: D. Payne & M. Bosire (eds.) Proceedings of ACAL 46. Berlin: Language Science Press.
  • 2014 Discourse functions of demonstratives in eastern Bantu narrative texts. Studies in African Linguistics 43(2):125–144. https://doi.org/10.32473/sal.v43i2.107265
  • 2012 Diachrony and grammaticalization. In: Robert Binnick (ed.) The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 370–397. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • LING 360 Morphosyntax I
  • LING 491/691 Discourse Analysis
  • LING 493/593 Semantics & Pragmatics
  • LING 493/593 Principles of Translation
  • LING 555 Historical & Comparative Linguistics