Keynote

Mompoloki Mmangaka Bagwasi

Mompoloki Mmangaka Bagwasi is Professor and Head of Department of English at the University of Botswana where she has been teaching for more than three decades. She obtained her PhD from Indiana University, USA, in 2002. Her dissertation, “A Historical Development of a Botswana Variety of English”, is a sociolinguistic analysis of letters written by British administrators and Batswana chiefs between 1885 and 1966 when Bechuanaland (now Botswana) was a British protectorate. Most of her publications on Botswana English and critical discourse analysis are inspired by or based on data from the huge corpus of colonial correspondences she put together. Among her notable publications are “Education, multilingualism and bilingualism in Botswana” (International Journal of the Sociology of Language 267-268: 43-54 2021), “Englishising African cultures: Revisiting acculturated forms of English in Botswana” (Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27 (2): 196-208, 2014), and “Pragmatics of letter writing in Setswana” (Journal of Pragmatics 40 (3): 525-536, 2008).

Plenary

Hans-Georg Wolf

Hans-Georg Wolf holds the chair of Development and Variation of the English Language at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests include cognitive sociolinguistics, cultural linguistics, sociolinguistics, lexicography, and intercultural pragmatics. He has published a number of monographs and edited volumes – including English in Cameroon (2001) and World Englishes: A Cognitive Sociolinguistic Approach (with Frank Polzenhagen, 2009) – and some 60 journal articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of the Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts series, John Benjamins, and on the editorial board of such journals as World Englishes and the International Journal of Language and Culture.