Prof Langa Khumalo
Executive Director
Biography:
Langa Khumalo is a Full Professor and Executive Director of the South African Center for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) at the North-West University (NWU). He is the former Director of Language Planning and Development at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).
He is a member of the Oxford Business Alumni Network. He is the current Chair and Coordinator of the Africa Union (AU) IsiZulu Language Commission. He is the immediate past Chair of the Universities South Africa (USAf)’s Community of Practice for the Teaching and Learning of African Languages (CoPAL). He is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society (FCCS), a former Language Champion in the Oxford Global Languages program (OGL) for Oxford University Press (UK), a member of the Scientific Board of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS, University of the Western Cape), the current President of the African Association for Lexicography (AFRILEX), and a member of the inaugural Executive Committee of the Digital Humanities in Southern Africa (DHASA). He is a board member of the African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) Project based at Uppsala University in Sweden, that is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.
He has previously served as a member of the Language Policy Review Working Group appointed by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). He is currently a Member of the Advisory Panel for Language Policy Implementation appointed by DHET. He is an award-winning author in Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. He is a recipient of the Staff Excellence Award (2018) for Excellence in Teaching in the College of Humanities at UKZN. He has received a Recognition Award from the University of the Free State (UFS) for his global contribution to Multilingualism. He is a Fellow of Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences (ZAS), and Adjunct Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Qualifications:
- Certificate, Strategic Leadership Programme, University of Oxford, UK, 2022.
- Certificate, Advanced Leadership Development Programme, University of KwaZulu-Natal, SA, 2016.
- PhD Linguistics, University of Oslo, Norway, 2007.
- MPhil. Linguistics, University of Cambridge, UK, 2000.
- Certificate, Corpus Linguistics, Tuscany Word Centre, Italy, 1999.
Work experience:
- 2014 – 2020 Director: University Language Planning and Development Office, UKZN.
- 2015 – 2019 Language Champion: Oxford Global Languages, Oxford University Press (UK).
- 2018 – 2020 Associate Professor, School of Arts, UKZN.
Publications: