Stories

  1. How Corpus Linguistics Reveals Changes In Setswana GrammarGrammar is often described as a fixed system of rules, yet living languages continually adjust to new speakers, technologies, institutions and social settings.…
  2. Defining Love Across Languages“Love” looks like a familiar word, yet its meaning changes with culture, relationship, grammar and context. It can describe romantic attachment, family…
  3. What a 19th-Century Setswana Dictionary Can Teach Us TodayA 19th-century Setswana dictionary is far more than a list of translated words. It is a record of encounters between speakers, missionaries, teachers, traders…
  4. Translating UN Documents into Setswana: A Case StudyTranslating a United Nations document into Setswana involves much more than replacing English words with their dictionary equivalents. A UN text carries legal,…
  5. The lexicographer's toolkit: building a corpus from scratchA corpus begins where intuition ends. For any serious dictionary-maker, the leap from collecting interesting words to building a defensible record of how a…
  6. Tracing the roots of five common Setswana surnamesAcross southern Africa, surnames carry more than family history — they encode meaning, behaviour, and sometimes even a story about an ancestor's trade or…
  7. Setswana has no native word for computerEvery day, speakers of every language use words whose origins they have never paused to consider. The word "computer" is a small but telling example. In most…
  8. Tracing English loanwords in Setswana dictionariesEvery dictionary tells a story of contact, encounter, and quiet negotiation between speech communities. When a word crosses from one language into another, it…
  9. The Story Behind the Word "Morse" in SetswanaThe word "Morse" occupies a small but fascinating corner of Setswana vocabulary, and tracing its history opens a window into how African languages record the…