Internasionale Adviesraad | International Advisory Board

She is a Fellow of Churchill College, Director of Studies in Linguistics at 7 of the University’s colleges (Churchill, Corpus Christi, Lucy Cavendish, Magdalene, Robinson, St Edmund’s and St John’s), and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Section. She also holds extraordinary professorships at Stellenbosch University, her alma mater, and at the University of the Western Cape, where she has been collaborating on the NRF-funded ‘Syntactic Ecology of Kaaps’ project since 2019. Her main research interests are in the comparative morphosyntax (synchronic and diachronic) of languages, particularly those with complex sociolinguistic histories and current realities. She wrote her PhD dissertation (2004, University of Cambridge) on word-order variation in Afrikaans, and Afrikaans, in all its forms, has remained central to her research throughout her career. Much of her current solo and collaborative research focuses on the distinctive properties that specifically characterise spoken-language systems, and the unique insights these facilitate into the way the human mind constructs language.

He was trained in corpus lexicography at the University of Oxford, University of Brighton and the University of Pretoria. His research is in the interface between computing, language, and culture. Between 2019 and 2020 he was a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of California, Davis where he explored computational programming of African languages. In the last ten years, Professor Otlogetswe has written over ten books including numerous dictionaries. Most of his publications have been on the development of his own language, Setswana, which is spoken in Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe the Northern Cape and North West provinces of South Africa. He has also developed several spellcheckers, language databases and worked with international companies such as Google and Firefox. Professor Otlogetswe is also a member of the African Union Academy of Languages where he periodically trains language practitioners in lexicography and language documentation around the continent in countries such as Angola, Niger, Eswatini and Mali. He supervised the compilation of the first Siswati monolingual dictionary Umphandza: Sichazamagama SesiSwati which was funded by the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS). Professor Otlogetswe is the recipient of the Botswana 2013 Presidential Order of Honour (PH), being an honour awarded to a deserving individual for efficient and devoted service to the Republic of Botswana.

He holds an MSc in microelectronic engineering from University College Ghent, as well as an MA and PhD in African languages and cultures from Ghent University. He is the author or co-author of about 350 books, book chapters, journal articles and conference papers, mainly on Bantu corpus linguistics and lexicography. His publications also include award-winning dictionaries for Northern Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa, published with Oxford University Press, as well as various online dictionaries, amongst others the most popular one for Swahili. Prof. de Schryver is the current President of EURALEX (since 2018), the European Association for Lexicography, and a two-term past President of AFRILEX (2009-2013), its African sister association. He has also served on the executive boards of ASIALEX (2007-2013) and AUSTRALEX (2008-2013), and is currently facilitating the creation of AMERICALEX, the Association of Lexicography for the Americas (South, Center, Caribbean and Mexico).