Author: Gilles-Maurice de Schryver

Makerere University (in Kampala, Uganda) officially launched the teaching of Lusoga, marking a historic expansion of indigenous language scholarship during celebrations of International Mother Language Day 2026.

 

The launch was presided over by His Majesty William Gabula Nadiope IV, the Kyabazinga of Busoga.

 

Dr. Minah Nabirye (PhD in African languages & cultures) is a Musoga, was born in Busoga, is rooted in Kisoga, and her native language is Lusoga. De facto, Lusoga is an oral Bantu language spoken in the East of Uganda. Dr. Nabirye’s entire research career has been devoted to putting the Lusoga language, the Kisoga traditions, the history of the Busoga Kingdom, and the Basoga people themselves on the map.

 

She was a lexicographer during her MA dissertation, and as an aside she produced the first monolingual Lusoga dictionary (Eiwanika). She was a linguist during her PhD thesis, and as an aside she produced the first scientific grammar of the language (Manual for Teachers). During the initial phase of her postdoc she was a corpus builder, and as an aside she produced the first academic collection of oral transcriptions of spoken Lusoga (Owayanga).

Having completed the Boasian ‘dictionary-grammar-text’ trilogy for a single language, she fought to get Lusoga into the education system, from Primary, over Secondary, all the way to Tertiary. With the help of fellow Basoga like Dr. Gulere Cornelius (PhD in Lusoga literature and Kisoga culture) and Dr. Moses Wambi (PhD in Education Management), they provided the groundwork.

 

Let the Lusoga language now flourish at Makerere University!

Several BantUGent members presented their latest research on modality at the International Conference on Modality in Bantu: Variation & Change, which took place at Mkwawa University College of Education, in Iringa, Tanzania, on 20-21 February 2026.

BantUGent members gave the following talks:

• Maud Devos, Minah Nabirye & Gilles-Maurice de Schryver – The subjunctive in Swahili: Core deontic, peripheral epistemic, as well as non-modal(?) uses. Insights from the Historical Swahili Corpus 2.0
• Aron Zahran – Modality in the languages of the Lower Zambezi (N30-40, S10)
• Mary Zacharia Charwi & Rasmus Bernander – Swahili loans within the Kuria modal domain
• Deo Kawalya – Modality in Ugandan Bantu languages, and lessons for future researchers
• Ferdinand Mberamihigo – From main verb to modality in Kirundi (JD62)

An example:

The subjunctive in Swahili: Insights from the Historical Swahili Corpus 2.0

In a recent series of articles Gilles-Maurice de Schryver focuses on three chatbots in the field of lexicography, and this for three languages from three markedly different language families:

• GPT-4o for Lusoga (Bantu, JE16)
• Gemini-2.5 for Portuguese (with a focus on the Brazilian variety)
• DeepSeek-R1 for Chinese (with the help of native speaker Wanjing Han)

Available from UGent Biblio as:

• Out-of-the-box GPTs for lexicography (for English, Portuguese, Swahili, Xhosa, Lusoga)
• Customised GPTs for lexicography (for Portuguese, Lusoga)
• DeepSeek as the ultimate translator and lexicographer (for Chinese)

The talk ‘Broken in Uganda’, which Gilles-Maurice de Schryver presented on August 15, 2023, at the ‘Third Biannual Conference of the Language Association of Eastern Africa’ in Kampala, is now available on YouTube. In this talk focusing on the Ugandan language Lusoga, he criticizes Uganda’s National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), an institution under the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoE&S) responsible for the development of educational curricula for Pre-primary, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary institutions in Uganda, for not taking indigenous Bantu languages seriously enough.