About the Seshegopuo Linguistics Winter School

The Seshegopuo Linguistics Winter School is an initiative aimed at fostering advanced research capacity in General Linguistics and the study of African languages. It brings together emerging scholars and established researchers to explore the structure of language through both theoretical and empirical lenses. The school supports the development of locally grounded, globally relevant linguistic research by offering intensive training in formal analysis, corpus methods, and experimental approaches. The School is committed to building collaborative networks, promoting linguistic diversity, and contributing to the creation of high-quality digital language resources in General Linguistics.

Seshegopuo is a Sesotho term that can be glossed as “manner of speaking” or “form of linguistic expression.” Its semantic scope encompasses not just the act of speaking, but the culturally situated, socially attuned ways in which speech is produced and interpreted. It foregrounds language as praxis—language as something that is done, performed, and evaluated within particular communities.

We chose Seshegopuo as the name for this Linguistics Winter School to signal our commitment to African languages and to the theoretical, descriptive, and empirical study of their structure and use. It reflects our vision to centre African linguistic systems as sites of scholarly inquiry in their own right, and to support the development of a new generation of linguists working on—and in—African languages.

The term Seshegopuo encapsulates our core belief that language is not merely a neutral vehicle for communication, but a richly patterned and socially embedded system, worthy of sustained academic attention and intellectual investment.