Ugandan Languages: Vitality, Resources and Capacity Building

' We celebrate 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages "

To honor the Indigenous languages of Uganda we organize a community week with events, lectures and workshops

Where: Makerere University, 18 – 22 November 2019

'The following events are planned:

Ugandan Language Fair

The fair will host a poster session and small events presenting the work of invited communities and individuals.

Opening Speeches

Judge Daniel David Ntanda Nsereko

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Ugandan Indigenous Languages: Our Heritage Professor Ntanda Nsereko is a judge at the International Criminal Court at Den Hagues. He has taught law at Makerere University and the University of Botswana. Professor Ntanda Nsereko is an ardent promoter of Luganda and all indigenous Ugandan languages and an author of books and articles on law and Human Rights. He has also translated Sophocles' Antigone into Luganda, and published an English-Luganda dictionary of law terms.

'Professor Manuel Muranga

The case of Rukiga - A discussion of language development and language standardization.

Professor Muranga, Kabale University, has been active in the promotion of mother tongues since the introduction of Runyakitara at Makerere in 1990, and has taught Runyakitara at the Uganda Christian University.

Professor Muranga will talk about language diversity in Uganda and about Runyakitara.

Call for participation

If you would like to present a poster or an initiative, or if you work with language development in an academic setting or otherwise, please contact the organizers at Makerere University. We would love to hear from you. If you are a developer of language technology working in Uganda, or on Ugandan languages, please contact us. We would like to promote your work.

Signed up initiatives:

Dorika Publications was founded by the writer Waalabyeki Magoba. It is committed to producing quality Luganda literature to create a permanent yearning for reading in children and adults.

Polytext is a small Norwegian software company. It produces linguistic tools and resources especially for lesser-resourced languages.

'

DEMA Language Solutions. DEMA is a small company that offers LANGUAGE SOLUTIONS. It is specialized in Translations, Localisation, Transcription and Editing Services.

Workshops and Theme talks

Theme 1

Speech technologies for low resource languages: an introduction

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Laurent Besacier

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Professor Besacier i s a Computer Scientist at the University of Grenoble, France, and Co-chair and ISCA liaison representative of the Special Interest Group for Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) at ELRA (European Language Resources Association).

Theme 2

Computational language documentation: an introduction

Keynote speaker: Prof. Laurent Besacier

Theme 1 and 2 are accompanied by a Hands-on tutorials on speech data collection and annotation softwares.

Theme 3

Corpus building for less-resourced languages: the creation of African language resources.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Dorothee Beermann

Professor Beermann is a Linguist at the University of Science and Technology, Norway.

She is one of the Co-founders of Polytext and a contributor to SIGUL at ELRA (European Language Resources Association).

Theme 3 is accompanied by a Hands-on tutorial on the creation of annotated text corpora.

Panel discussion

How do we strengthen Uganda’s local languages?

Participants community members, initiative representatives, companies and developers