Education

Prof. Thapelo J. Otlogetswe's academic journey spans three countries and some of the world's leading institutions in linguistics and lexicography. Below is a chronological summary of his formal qualifications and advanced research training.

• Philosophiae Doctor (PhD) — 2008 University of Pretoria, South Africa (and Brighton, UK)

  Thesis: Corpus design for Setswana lexicography. Supervised by D.J. Prinsloo, Adam Kilgarriff, and Roger Evans.

• Post Graduate Certificate in Research — 2005 Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI), University of Brighton, UK
• Master of Philosophy (M.Phil) — 2001 University of Oxford, United Kingdom

  Thesis: Word meaning, disambiguation and dictionaries: The Setswana case.

• Bachelor of Arts (Humanities) with First Class Honours in English — 1997 University of Botswana

These qualifications underpin Prof. Otlogetswe's research in corpus linguistics, lexicography, and the computational analysis of the Setswana language. His doctoral work, conducted jointly between Pretoria and Brighton, established foundational methodologies for building and evaluating Setswana text corpora for dictionary development.

For an overview of his current research directions and supervision opportunities, see the Research page.

A lexicographer's work is never merely about listing words; it is an act of cultural preservation and national identity. For a language like Setswana, spoken across Botswana and beyond, the dictionary becomes a record of how a people understand themselves, their values, and their world. Each entry carries the weight of tradition, the rhythm of daily speech, and the resilience of a tongue that has carried stories, laws, and prayers through generations. The careful study of corpus data reveals not just how words are used, but how a nation thinks, argues, and dreams. In this sense, lexicography is a quiet but powerful force in the life of a country, grounding its citizens in a shared linguistic heritage while equipping them for the future.