Ugandan Languages: Vitality, Resources and Capacity Building
We celebrate 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages
Where: Makerere University, 19 – 21 November 2019
'The following events are planned:
Ugandan Language Fair
The fair welcomes you to attend two stimulating keynote speeches and a poster session showcasing initiatives in local language development.
KEYNOTES
Judge Daniel David Ntanda Nsereko
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
Professor Muranga, Kabale University, has been active in the promotion of mother tongues since the introduction of Runyakitara at Makerere in 1990. He has taught Runyakitara at the Uganda Christian University.
Professor Muranga will talk about language diversity in Uganda and about Runyakitara.
PRESENTATIONS
During the presentation session you are invited to visit stands to hear more about the work done for the development of Uganda's local languages.
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Workshop
THEME 1
Speech technologies for low resource languages: an introduction and Computational language documentation: an introduction
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Laurent Besacier
Prof. Besacier's talks are accompanied by a hands-on tutorial on speech data collection and annotation software.
THEME 2
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). She is a formal linguist with long experience in creating Interlinear Glossed Texts corpora for less-resourced languages. Prof. Beermann's talk will be accompanied by a hands-on tutorial on the creation of annotated text corpora.